The Social Engineer S Playbook

The Social Engineer's Playbook is a practical guide to pretexting and a collection of social engineering pretexts for Hackers, Social Engineers and Security Analysts. Build effective social engineering plans using the techniques, tools and expert guidance in this book. Learn valuable elicitation techniques, such as: Bracketing, Artificial Ignorance, Flattery, Sounding Board and others. This book covers an introduction to tools, such as: Maltego, Social Engineer Toolkit, Dradis, Metasploit and Kali Linux among others. Crucial to any social engineering test is the information used to build it. Discover the most valuable sources of intel and how to put them to use.

Harden the human firewall against the most current threats Social Engineering: The Science of Human Hacking reveals the craftier side of the hacker’s repertoire—why hack into something when you could just ask for access? Undetectable by firewalls and antivirus software, social engineering relies on human fault to gain access to sensitive spaces; in this book, renowned expert Christopher Hadnagy explains the most commonly-used techniques that fool even the most robust security personnel, and shows you how these techniques have been used in the past. The way that we make decisions as humans affects everything from our emotions to our security. Hackers, since the beginning of time, have figured out ways to exploit that decision making process and get you to take an action not in your best interest. This new Second Edition has been updated with the most current methods used by sharing stories, examples, and scientific study behind how those decisions are exploited. Networks and systems can be hacked, but they can also be protected; when the “system” in question is a human being, there is no software to fall back on, no hardware upgrade, no code that can lock information down indefinitely. Human nature and emotion is the secret weapon of the malicious social engineering, and this book shows you how to recognize, predict, and prevent this type of manipulation by taking you inside the social engineer’s bag of tricks. Examine the most common social engineering tricks used to gain access Discover which popular techniques generally don’t work in the real world Examine how our understanding of the science behind emotions and decisions can be used by social engineers Learn how social engineering factors into some of the biggest recent headlines Learn how to use these skills as a professional social engineer and secure your company Adopt effective counter-measures to keep hackers at bay By working from the social engineer’s playbook, you gain the advantage of foresight that can help you protect yourself and others from even their best efforts. Social Engineering gives you the inside information you need to mount an unshakeable defense.

Learn how to build a cybersecurity program for a changing world with the help of proven best practices and emerging techniques Key FeaturesUnderstand what happens in an attack and build the proper defenses to secure your organizationDefend against hacking techniques such as social engineering, phishing, and many morePartner with your end user community by building effective security awareness training programsBook Description Security is everyone's responsibility and for any organization, the focus should be to educate their employees about the different types of security attacks and how to ensure that security is not compromised. This cybersecurity book starts by defining the modern security and regulatory landscape, helping you understand the challenges related to human behavior and how attacks take place. You'll then see how to build effective cybersecurity awareness and modern information security programs. Once you've learned about the challenges in securing a modern enterprise, the book will take you through solutions or alternative approaches to overcome those issues and explain the importance of technologies such as cloud access security brokers, identity and access management solutions, and endpoint security platforms. As you advance, you'll discover how automation plays an important role in solving some key challenges and controlling long-term costs while building a maturing program. Toward the end, you'll also find tips and tricks to keep yourself and your loved ones safe from an increasingly dangerous digital world. By the end of this book, you'll have gained a holistic understanding of cybersecurity and how it evolves to meet the challenges of today and tomorrow. What you will learnUnderstand the macro-implications of cyber attacksIdentify malicious users and prevent harm to your organizationFind out how ransomware attacks take placeWork with emerging techniques for improving security profilesExplore identity and access management and endpoint securityGet to grips with building advanced automation modelsBuild effective training programs to protect against hacking techniquesDiscover best practices to help you and your family stay safe onlineWho this book is for This book is for security practitioners, including analysts, engineers, and security leaders, who want to better understand cybersecurity challenges. It is also for beginners who want to get a holistic view of information security to prepare for a career in the cybersecurity field. Business leaders looking to learn about cyber threats and how they can protect their organizations from harm will find this book especially useful. Whether you're a beginner or a seasoned cybersecurity professional, this book has something new for everyone.

Mitigate human risk and bake security into your organization’s culture from top to bottom with insights from leading experts in security awareness, behavior, and culture. The topic of security culture is mysterious and confusing to most leaders. But it doesn’t have to be. In The Security Culture Playbook, Perry Carpenter and Kai Roer, two veteran cybersecurity strategists deliver experience-driven, actionable insights into how to transform your organization’s security culture and reduce human risk at every level. This book exposes the gaps between how organizations have traditionally approached human risk and it provides security and business executives with the necessary information and tools needed to understand, measure, and improve facets of security culture across the organization. The book offers: An expose of what security culture really is and how it can be measured A careful exploration of the 7 dimensions that comprise security culture Practical tools for managing your security culture program, such as the Security Culture Framework and the Security Culture Maturity Model Insights into building support within the executive team and Board of Directors for your culture management program Also including several revealing interviews from security culture thought leaders in a variety of industries, The Security Culture Playbook is an essential resource for cybersecurity professionals, risk and compliance managers, executives, board members, and other business leaders seeking to proactively manage and reduce risk.

Manipulative communication—from early twentieth-century propaganda to today’s online con artistry—examined through the lens of social engineering. The United States is awash in manipulated information about everything from election results to the effectiveness of medical treatments. Corporate social media is an especially good channel for manipulative communication, with Facebook a particularly willing vehicle for it. In Social Engineering, Robert Gehl and Sean Lawson show that online misinformation has its roots in earlier techniques: mass social engineering of the early twentieth century and interpersonal hacker social engineering of the 1970s, converging today into what they call “masspersonal social engineering.” As Gehl and Lawson trace contemporary manipulative communication back to earlier forms of social engineering, possibilities for amelioration become clearer. The authors show how specific manipulative communication practices are a mixture of information gathering, deception, and truth-indifferent statements, all with the instrumental goal of getting people to take actions the social engineer wants them to. Yet the term “fake news,” they claim, reduces everything to a true/false binary that fails to encompass the complexity of manipulative communication or to map onto many of its practices. They pay special attention to concepts and terms used by hacker social engineers, including the hacker concept of “bullshitting,” which the authors describe as a truth-indifferent mix of deception, accuracy, and sociability. They conclude with recommendations for how society can undermine masspersonal social engineering and move toward healthier democratic deliberation.

Todays world is no more inoculated from dangerous political ideologies than it was in the past: while former communist countries have become full fledged democracies, some flagship democracies have been slowly gravitating towards leftist ideals. Lefty's Playbook asserts that this leftward gravitation is no accident, but a well choreographed plan. Lefty's Playbook lays out this plan in a format written to reach all levels of political education: as a primer for those who are unaware, as a confirmation for those who are suspect, and as a reminder for those who understand what lies behind the veil of leftist ideology.

Avoid becoming the next ransomware victim by taking practical steps today Colonial Pipeline. CWT Global. Brenntag. Travelex. The list of ransomware victims is long, distinguished, and sophisticated. And it's growing longer every day. In Ransomware Protection Playbook, computer security veteran and expert penetration tester Roger A. Grimes delivers an actionable blueprint for organizations seeking a robust defense against one of the most insidious and destructive IT threats currently in the wild. You'll learn about concrete steps you can take now to protect yourself or your organization from ransomware attacks. In addition to walking you through the necessary technical preventative measures, this critical book will show you how to: Quickly detect an attack, limit the damage, and decide whether to pay the ransom Implement a pre-set game plan in the event of a game-changing security breach to help limit the reputational and financial damage Lay down a secure foundation of cybersecurity insurance and legal protection to mitigate the disruption to your life and business A must-read for cyber and information security professionals, privacy leaders, risk managers, and CTOs, Ransomware Protection Playbook is an irreplaceable and timely resource for anyone concerned about the security of their, or their organization's, data.

An easy-to-use psychology primer for anyone wanting to spread progressive social change. Developed so that non-profits, community organizers and others can make science-driven decisions in their advocacy work.