All You Wanted to Know About Social Engineering

All You Wanted to Know About Social Engineering: Social engineering is manipulating people into doing something, rather than using technical means. It is the art of gaining access to buildings, systems, or data by exploiting human psychology, rather than by using technical hacking techniques. For example, a social engineer might call an employee and pose as an IT support person, trying to trick the employee into divulging his password. The goal is always to gain the trust of one or more of your employees.

A system has hardware, software, and wetware; wetware being the human element of the system. With million-dollar security systems and state-of-the-art security technology, the first two systems may be impenetrable, but with enough patience and knowledge, a social engineer can use weaknesses in the wetware to trick an unsuspecting target into revealing sensitive information. Social engineering is a use of psychological knowledge to trick a target into trusting the engineer and ultimately revealing information.