Social engineering

How it is used

The umbrella term for phishing, pretexting (inventing a believable story), fake help-desk calls and tailgating into buildings. Used in awareness training and in pentest scopes, where a social engineering test must be explicitly approved.

Example sentences

1. The caller used social engineering, pretending to be from IT and asking for a reset code.

2. Social engineering is out of scope for this year's test.

Common collocations

• social engineering attack
• social engineering test
• pretexting
• tailgating

Related terms

• phishingA trick in which attackers send fake emails, messages or websites that look trustworthy, hoping people will click a link, open a file or reveal their passwords.
• security awarenessEmployees' knowledge of everyday security risks, such as phishing and weak passwords, and of what to do about them; also the training that builds this knowledge.
• spoofingFaking an identity or source, such as an email sender, a phone number, a website or an IP address, so that a message or connection seems to come from someone trusted.
• credentialsThe details that prove who a user is and let them log in, most often a username and password, but also keys, tokens and certificates.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• social engineering · Software Engineering

More terms: Threats and Attacks

• threat
• exploit
• compromise
• DDoS
• attack surface
• brute-force attack
• privilege escalation
• lateral movement
• SQL injection
• cross-site scripting
• man-in-the-middle attack
• threat actor