Summary

Mind tricks are the heart of a social engineering attack. They allow a social engineer to get into the target's brain and alter their decision making to follow a certain route. This chapter has gone through many ways in which a social engineer can get into a target's brain. The focus has been the subconscious brain, which plays a very important decision-making role in that it makes decisions before the conscious brain. Once some information is given to this part of the brain, it will decide in favor of it. The subconscious brain is, however, open to attacks. Emotions can be planted into it through microexpressions, thoughts can be sneaked into it, and it can suffer from buffer overflow. It is these vulnerabilities that allow social engineers to hack humans into deciding to make certain decisions. It has been discussed how all these things take time to practice...