Summary

Persuasion is a vital step in social engineering. It allows the social engineer to make progress in the whole attack. This chapter has gone through the fundamentals of persuasion, highlighting the aspects that make a persuasion attempt successful. We have also gone through influence tactics that have been successfully used by politicians and the media to get people to buy their ideas. These tactics include reciprocation, obligation, concession, scarcity, authority, commitment, consistency, and, finally, liking. We then looked at how social engineers alter reality using framing. We explained the ways through which the truth can be bent to be favorable to the social engineer. The rules for making the alteration of reality have also been discussed. Finally, this chapter has looked into manipulation, one of the strongest influence and persuasion tools. It has explained how...