The tools for social engineering

To increase the success chances of an attack, social engineers will often employ a number of tools. We will look at the physical, phone-based, and software tools used in the social engineering process.

Physical tools

These are hardware tools that are used to assist with data gathering or to enable a social engineer to perform some actions. They are explained in the following sections.

Lockpicks

Lockpicking is commonly depicted in movies as a simple task that involves the insertion of a lockpick into a lock and with minimal effort getting a door open. In reality, it is not that simple. A social engineer may have to gain entrance into some places that have been secured using locks and a lockpick may come in handy. It might seem that this skill is useless due to the adoption of magnetic cards, biometric authentication, and RFID chipped cards in access control. However, it is more important than ever. These electronic access control measures are employed at obvious...