Social Engineering:- To Hack The Human Mind 
This has become one of the hottest topics today and it seems to work out most of the times. Social Engineering doesn’t deal with the network security issues, vulnerabilities, exploits, etc. It just deals with simple psychological tricks that help to get the information we want. This really works!! But it requires a lot of patience.
We are all talking about network security and fixing the vulnerabilities in networks. But what happens if some internal person of a network accidentally gives out the passwords. After all we are all humans; we are also vulnerable and can be easily exploited and compromised than the computers.
Social Engineering attacks have become most common during the chat sessions. With the increase in use of Instant Messengers, any anonymous person may have a chat with another any where in the world. The most crucial part of this attack is to win the trust of the victim.
It may take a long time (may be in minutes, hours, days or months) for this to happen. But after you are being trusted by the victim he will say you every thing about him. Most of the times his person information will be useful to crack his web accounts like e-mail ids, etc. Even some people are so vulnerable to this attack that they even give their credit card numbers to the strangers (social engineers).
Some social engineers stepped one more forward and they send some keyloggers or Trojans to the victims claimed to be as screensavers or pics. These keyloggers when executed gets installed and send back information to the attacker. So be careful with such attacks.
Prevention:
1) Don’t believe everyone you meet on the net and tell them every thing about you. Don’t even accidentally say answers to the questions like “What’s you pet’s name?”, “What is your mothermaiden’s name?”, etc. which are particularly used by your web account providers to remind your passwords.
2) Don’t give your credit card details to even your chating through instant messengers. Remember, it’s not a hard deal for an attacker to crack an e-mail id and chat with you like your friend. Also data through IMs can be easily sniffed.
3) Don’t accept executable files (like *.exe, *.bat, *.vbs, *.scr, etc.) from unknown persons you meet on the net. They might be viruses or Trojans.
Please act carefully, use security software and ask professionals for help.
Social Engineering Toolkits are as follows :
SET :-
The Social-Engineering Toolkit (SET) is a python-driven suite of custom tools which solely focuses on attacking the human element of pentesting. It’s main purpose is to augment and simulate social-engineering attacks and allow the tester to effectively test how a targeted attack may succeed. Currently SET has two main methods of attack, one is utilizing Metasploit payloads and Java-based attacks by setting up a malicious website (which you can clone whatever one you want) that ultimately delivers your payload. The second method is through file-format bugs and e-mail phishing. The second method supports your own open-mail relay, a customized sendmail open-relay, or Gmail integration to deliver your payloads through e-mail. The goal of SET is to bring awareness to the often forgotten attack vector of social-engineering.
Video Tutorial:
MALTEGO :-
Maltego is a program that can be used to determine the relationships and real world links between: People, Groups of people (social networks), Companies, Organizations, Web sites, Internet infrastructure such as: Domains, DNS names, Netblocks, IP addresses, Phrases, Affiliations, Documents and files.
These entities are linked using open source intelligence.
Maltego is easy and quick to install – it uses Java, so it runs on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Maltego provides you with a graphical interface that makes seeing these relationships instant and accurate – making it possible to see hidden connections.
Using the graphical user interface (GUI) you can see relationships easily – even if they are three or four degrees of separation away.
Maltego is unique because it uses a powerful, flexible framework that makes customizing possible. As such, Maltego can be adapted to your own, unique requirements.
Video Tutorial
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