Let's spend a minute discussing social engineering attacks.
When you perform social engineering,
you have a number of attacks at your disposal.
The most common one that we see is phishing or spearphishing attacks.
The difference between phishing and spearphishing is that
spearphishing is a highly targeted form of phishing.
It involves emails being sent to well‑researched victims.
These type of emails are very difficult to stop because off
the bat they look very legitimate, so relying purely on
technical controls is not enough.
Then we have different types of website attacks. Now the most
common website attacks that you would see that relate to
phishing are credential harvesting attacks.
We also have attacks such as your HTA, or HTML application
attack, which relies on a Windows program running a scripting
language either in a VBScript or JavaScript.
Another form of an attack that we have is an infectious media attack.
In this attack,
you can create infectious media that can rely on the auto‑run
capability of Windows, and pretty much once this runs,
it spawns a reverse shell on which the attacker can access the targeted machine.
While these AP attacks are commonly used where you have public WiFi services
available, have you ever joined public WiFi and noticed that you can log in
either using your Gmail account or your Facebook account? Now imagine using a
malicious WiFi network harvesting those credentials. PowerShell attacks are
also used with social engineering.
In this type of attack,
the attacker tricks the user into running a malicious PowerShell script,
which then ultimately goes out and downloads malware that can
be used to remotely control the machine or drop either types of
malware on the targeted machine.
The social engineering toolkit enables you to create various types
of attacks that fall within these categories,
and it allows you to create a little bit more.