Practical Social Engineering

A guide to hacking the human element.

Even the most advanced security teams can do little to defend against an employee clicking a malicious link, opening an email attachment, or revealing sensitive information in a phone call. Practical Social Engineering will help you better understand the techniques behind these social engineering attacks and how to thwart cyber criminals and malicious actors who use them to take advantage of human nature.

Joe Gray, an award-winning expert on social engineering, shares case studies, best practices, open source intelligence (OSINT) tools, and templates for orchestrating and reporting attacks so companies can better protect themselves. He outlines creative techniques to trick users out of their credentials, such as leveraging Python scripts and editing HTML files to clone a legitimate website. Once you ve succeeded in harvesting information about your targets with advanced OSINT methods, you ll discover how to defend your own organization from similar threats.
 
You ll learn how to: 

Apply phishing techniques like spoofing, squatting, and standing up your own web server to avoid detection 

Use OSINT tools like Recon-ng, theHarvester, and Hunter 

Capture a target s information from social media 

Collect and report metrics about the success of your attack 

Implement technical controls and awareness programs to help defend against social engineering

 
Fast-paced, hands-on, and ethically focused, Practical Social Engineering is a book every pentester can put to use immediately.
 

Introduction

Part 1: The Basics
Chapter 1: What is Social Engineering?
Chapter 2: Ethical Considerations in Social Engineering

Part 2: Offensive Social Engineering
Chapter 3: Preparing for an Attack
Chapter 4: Gathering Business OSINT
Chapter 5: Social Media and Public Documents
Chapter 6: Gathering OSINT About People
Chapter 7: Phishing
Chapter 8: Cloning a Landing Page
Chapter 9: Detection, Measurement, and Reporting

Part 3: Defending Against Social Engineering
Chapter 10: Proactive Defense Techniques
Chapter 11: Technical Email Controls
Chapter 12: Producing Threat Intelligence

Appendix A: Scoping Worksheet
Appendix B: Reporting Template
Appendix C: Information Gathering Worksheet
Appendix D: Pretexting Samples
Appendix E: Exercises to Improve Your Social Engineering