How an attacker can use social engineering to fool an administrator into giving network access to the attacker

Social engineering is a collection of techniques used to manipulate people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. While similar to a confidence trick or simple fraud, the term typically applies to trickery for information gathering or computer system access and in most (but not all) cases the attacker never comes face-to-face with the victim.





The term has been popularized in recent years by well known (reformed) computer criminal and security consultant Kevin Mitnick who points out that it's much easier to trick someone into giving you his or her password for a system than to spend the effort to hack in. He claims it to be the single most effective method in his arsenal. David Mackey, director of security intelligence at IBM, stated "I think that in 2006 we're going to continue to see the computer user being the weak link", the underlying assumption being this is what makes social engineering possible.

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