Summary

Social engineering is a method of hacking humans, taking advantage of a person’s inherent trust and helpfulness to attack a network and its devices. In this chapter, we examined how social engineering can be used to facilitate attacks designed to capture credentials, activate malicious software, or assist in launching further attacks. Most of the attacks rely on SET and Gophish; however, Kali has several other applications that can be improved using a social engineering methodology. We explored how new bulk transfer companies can potentially be utilized to spread the payload without having to use any email services to perform phishing. We also examined how physical access, usually in conjunction with social engineering, can be used to place hostile devices on a target network.

In the next chapter, we will examine how to conduct reconnaissance against wireless networks and attack open networks, as well as networks that are protected with encryption schemes based...