Social engineering really boils down to exploiting the nature of humans to trust people. It uses techniques that rely on human weaknesses rather than software or hardware weaknesses. There are a number of social engineering tools available on the internet that you can leverage to launch a social engineering attack as part of your penetration test.

In this chapter, you have learned what social engineering is and the various types of social engineering. We highlighted the main features of each technique and looked at where you can find an up-to-date repository of the current phishing links that exist. We looked at common tools that can be used to create a social engineering campaign, and we worked on creating a campaign targeting Office 365.

In the next chapter (Chapter 5, Diving into the Metasploit Framework), we will begin working with Metasploit. We will look at what...