Professional Documents
Culture Documents
information like passwords or credit card numbers, or pretexting, where the attacker poses as someone
else to gain access to information or systems.
In some cases, a single attack may involve multiple forms of social engineering. For example, an attacker
may use a phishing email to gain access to a user's email account and then use that access to launch
further attacks, such as sending out more phishing emails to the user's contacts.
Once an attacker has gained access to a user's information, they may sell that information to other
criminals who can use it to run their own exploits. This can create a ripple effect, where a single
successful social engineering attack can lead to multiple other attacks against the user, their contacts,
and even their contacts’ contacts.
Overall, social engineering is a highly manipulative tactic that relies on exploiting human psychology and
emotions to achieve a desired outcome. It can be used for both malicious and benign purposes, but in
either case, it relies on the social engineer's ability to deceive and manipulate others.