Summary

This chapter looked at an important part of social engineering, pretexting. It looked at seven principles that help make a pretexting attempt successful. It looked at the importance of the principle of researching so as to get enough information about a target. It also looked at the identification of personal interests so as to quickly get a target to comply. The use of accents so as to make a pretext more convincing has been looked at. Some steps that can be used to help one acquire an accent for this purpose have been given. The chapter explained the use of phones, which have high success rates as most hackers today rely on emails and the internet. Spontaneity has also been looked at and how it affects the chances of success in an attack, especially during a verbal interaction with a target. The last principle looked at is the provision of logical conclusions to targets...