There is a common belief that all sorts of problems can be solved by technology if only something or other. Unfortunately, whatever something or other is, it almost inevitably tends to be something that computers cannot solve. Social engineering, defined as psychological manipulation to produce a desired effect on people's behavior, is one of those problems because it is fundamentally not a technological problem but a psychological one.

It's also important to keep in mind that the tricksters, con artists, and other scammers who use social engineering have access to the same technologies as those who defend against them and are subject to the same types of evolutionary pressures we see in other cyber domains. In other words, if the defenders get better at protecting, the attackers respond by getting better at assault.

This does not mean that it is pointless to try to stop social engineering, but that it is going to require more than technology to defend against it, and there's never going to be such a thing as a 100% defense.