A Gentle Introduction to Social Engineering Attack and Prevention

Should that delivery man be walking around the office unattended? Has someone just asked you to hold the door and you don't recognise them? Do you trust that person trying to befriend you in the bar next to the office? These are all potential social engineering plays against you by professional criminals. Social engineering is one of the biggest threats to our organizations today. Social engineers use manipulation techniques to coerce people into revealing secrets about our companies to allow attackers to gain access to critical systems. In this book, we will look at some of the techniques used in social engineering and look at how to guard yourself against them. We will cover subjects like: Information gathering Pretexting Elicitation Manipulation Personal mitigation techniques Corporate mitigation techniques About the Author Stephen Haunts is an experienced software developer with a focus on Microsoft .NET technologies and security for back-end enterprise systems. Stephen is also a Pluralsight Author, blogger at www.stephenhaunts.com, writer and international conference speaker at events like NDC London, NDC Oslo, NDC Sydney, Techorama and SDD Conf. Stephen also runs a user group called Derbyshire Dot Net in the UK.