social engineering

Social engineering stands for social technology or social science. It involves the manipulation of people in order to influence their behavior and thereby obtain certain, usually confidential or unauthorized information.

The possible applications of social engineering include buyer manipulation, unauthorized use of paid web services, attacks on personal data and identification numbers, and even industrial espionage. It involves attacks to obtain information.

In social engineering, which is also referred to as scam or scamming, the attacks can occur at all levels of communication: In a personal conversation, during a telephone call, or during the exchange of data. In this constellation, the personal contact is crucial, the built trust, good faith, gratitude or other human characteristics. It is different when penetrating a computer system or a database. Here it is a matter of spying out passwords, access authorizations, logins and authentications. In addition to phishing and spear phishing, social engineering uses methods ofpretexting, baiting, tailgating and scareware, and quid pro quo as a further attack technique. The success of attacks via social engineering is based solely on the human ego and its weaknesses, flaws and trust.