Even if you’ve got all the bells and whistles when it comes to securing your data center, your cloud deployments, your building’s physical security, and you’ve invested in defensive technologies, have the right security policies and processes in place and measure their effectiveness and continuously improve, still a crafty social engineer can weasel his way right through (or around).

How does social engineering work?

The phrase “social engineering” encompasses a wide range of behaviors, and what they all have in common is that they exploit certain universal human qualities: greed, curiosity, politeness, deference to authority, and so on. While some classic examples of social engineering take place in the “real world”—a man in a FedEx uniform bluffing his way into an office building, for example—much of our daily social interaction takes place online, and that’s where most social engineering attacks happen as well. For instance, you might not think of phishing or smishing as types of social engineering attacks, but both rely on tricking you—by pretending to be someone you trust or tempting you with something you want—into downloading malware onto your device.

This brings up another important point, which is that social engineering can represent a single step in a larger attack chain. A smishing text uses social dynamics to entice you with a free gift card, but once you tap the link and download malicious code, your attackers will be using their technical skills to gain control of your device and exploit it.