Topics: Security & Insecurity, Insights, Hacking, Penetration Analysis, Human Factors
The InfoWorld article, "How to think like an online con man", gives a better than average overview of social engineering and how it is done.
Many tech magazine articles depict social engineering too simplisticly, making reader even more vulnerable to real life social engineering. A common example of the simplistic depiction is that of the human factors hacker calling a corporate employee and poses as a tech support person. "We're having trouble with our network and we need to test your connection.... what your user ID?.... Good, and what's your password?..." The trouble is that the reader is expecting to be approached that obviously and, thus, fail to realise more subtle ways one can be manipulated. This InfoWorld article does a better job without giving away complete SE scripts.
InfoWorld also has a related story on "stupid hacker tricks, telling how some "hackers" have gotten tripped up by their own human factors foibles.
Have had encounters with unsocialable engineers,
J.D. Abolins