Elicitation

Perhaps the most important skill in the whole social engineering attack is that of drawing targets out to a point where they are open for exploitation. Elicitation is a powerful technique employed in key stages of the social engineering attack to make targets take on a path of behavior that the social engineer wants. An interesting definition of elicitation by the US National Security Agency (NSA) is that it is the subtle extraction of information during a normal conversation. Elicitation is one of the skills extensively taught to spies to ensure that they can munch out information from people without making it seem like they are actually being spied on. Conversations can take place just about anywhere and social engineers like to approach targets in locations that they (targets) are familiar with and thus feel comfortable with already when talking to new people. Humans...