Social Engineering: The Art of Human Hacking

Social engineering is used everyday, in every aspect of our life, without us even knowing at times! Not just by con men, hackers etc but sales reps, doctors, parents employers, teachers. Knowing and playing on human emotions is very powerful tool and can be used to manipulate people to do actions they normally would not do. The human brain is the CPU and hard-drive combined and this can be overloaded (human buffer attack) and manipulated by emotion triggering (which can be triggered by just bringing back a memory in the brain good/bad). Whether over the phone or in person (facial muscles perform certain twitches for every emotion, anyone watched Lie to Me?) the human is always open to attack.This book covers a wide range of topics, from how we use social engineering day to day in our personal lives, how the media/businesses use this globally and tests/case studies used by trained pentesters/social engineer auditors simply to just open peoples eyes to see this, its almost like our eyes are closed to all these techniques, as mostly done subconsciously.Would highly recommend having a read. I do believe the book is aimed at non-technical computer readers (as author really explains technical terms in layman) however even as a technical person this book still is very enjoyable read. It's all good breaking computer systems/networks but having the extra ability to break humans into giving you faster, direct, powerful entry is even more astonishing . This skill can be applied in every area of life, not just digitally, to ensure you are never ripped off (be it a sales man/media advertisements etc) and also helps you protect your family, work, business, investments, money and future as you will not be easily manipulated by this technique when you are aware.

It's informative and provides some classification on certain techniques that may well do without even realising when it comes to social interactions. Worth a read more than once I would say.

This is exactly what you’re looking for if you’re looking to learn the subject

Really useful starter book for those of us who want some theory without being preached at!

Great to listen to on your commute. Good coverage, interesting presentation.