Social Engineering Foundations

The course aims to give deeper understanding of the main psychological and technical background behind social engineering by giving a more detailed description the most recent offensive and defensive tools and techniques. The detailed theoretical background is followed by practical examples and simple exercises. The psychological and technical background are considered both. On the offensive side the core social engineering attack methods are described, including phishing, vishing, whaling, baiting, physical security, etc. The course covers advanced social engineering attacks using AI, especially GenAI and LLM based techniques and impersonation attacks, like voice cloning and Deepfakes. On the defensive side the legal aspects and the detection mechanisms are described.