What is Social Engineering?

Social engineering is a deception technique to achieve a particular action from a user, which ranges from executing a malicious program to getting this person to provide key information to the other party.

In the world of cybersecurity, social engineering is well known for being the basis of phishing attacks, or identity theft over the phone.

Social engineering is also used as part of security awareness campaigns in companies, as another way of obtaining information by cyber intelligence teams, and to support pentesting or red teaming services.