Introduction

Social engineering is an act of manipulating people to perform actions that they don't intend to do. A cyber-based socially engineered scenario is designed to trap a user into performing activities that can lead to the theft of confidential information or some malicious activity. The reason for the rapid growth of social engineering amongst hackers is that it is difficult to break the security of a platform, but it is far easier to trick the user of that platform into performing unintentional malicious activity. For example, it is difficult to break the security of Gmail in order to steal someone's password, but it is easy to create a social engineered scenario where the victim can be tricked to reveal his/her login information by sending a fake login/phishing page.

The Social Engineer Toolkit is designed to perform such tricking activities. Just like we have exploits and vulnerabilities for existing software and operating systems, SET is a generic exploit of humans in order...