Advanced Social Engineering and Physical Security

Social engineering is the art of extracting information from humans. It is a type of attack that has made great progress in recent years by exploiting behavior, and by finding the weaknesses in given circumstances and conditions. This attack can be effective when a human is tricked into providing physical access to their system. It is the single most successful attack vector used during red teaming exercises, penetration testing, or an actual attack. The success of a social engineering attacks relies on two key factors:

  • The knowledge that is gained during the reconnaissance phase. The attacker must know the names and usernames associated with the target; more importantly, the attacker must understand the concerns of the users on the network.
  • Understanding how to apply this knowledge to convince potential targets to activate the attack by impersonating, talking to them over the phone, inquiring about them, clicking on a link, or executing a program. In recent years, the following two tactics have been the most successful:
    • If the targeted company has recently finished the year-end appraisal, every employee in the company would be very much focused on receiving their updated salary package from the Human Resources department. Therefore, emails or documents with titles associated with that subject will likely be opened by the targeted individuals.
    • If the targeted company had acquired or merged with another, the type of social engineering attack would be whaling, targeted towards C-level managers and other high profile individuals of both the companies. The main principle behind this type of attack is that more privileges the user has, the more access the attackers gain.

Kali Linux provides several tools and frameworks that have an increased chance of success if social engineering is used as a pretext to influence victims to open files or execute certain operations. The examples include file-based executables created by the Metasploit framework and using file-less techniques such as PowerShell scripts using Empire.

In this chapter, we'll focus on the Social Engineering Toolkit (SEToolkit) and Gophish. The techniques used in employing these tools will serve as the model for using social engineering to deploy attacks from other tools.

By the end of this chapter, you will have learned the following:

  • Different social engineering attack methods that can be engaged by attackers
  • How to perform physical attacks at the console
  • How to create rogue physical devices using microcontrollers and USBs
  • How to harvest or collect usernames and passwords using the credential harvester attack
  • How to launch the tabnabbing and webjacking attacks
  • How to employ the multiattack web method
  • How to use PowerShell's alphanumeric shellcode injection attack
  • How to set up Gophish on Kali Linux
  • How to launch an email phishing campaign

To support SET's social engineering attacks, the following general implementation practices will be described:

  • Hiding malicious executables and obfuscating the attacker's URL
  • Escalating an attack using DNS redirection
  • Gaining access to the system and network through USB
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