Social engineering is when an attacker manipulates or tricks a victim into performing an action or providing private information. This is often done by impersonating a trusted person, creating a sense of urgency, or creating a false pretext to push the victim to act. The action may be as simple as divulging information, or more complex like downloading and executing malware.
We cover honeypots in this chapter, even though they are sometimes intended to trick bots and not humans. The goal is to intentionally deceive, which is the core of social engineering. We provide basic honeypot examples including TCP and HTTP honeypots.
There are many other types of social engineering that are not covered in this book. This includes physical or in-person situations, such as tailgating and pretending to be a maintenance worker, as well as other digital and remote methods...
