Social Engineering Toolkit — A systematic approach to social engineering

Social engineering techniques, exploiting humans as information systems' security weakest link, are mostly the initial attack vectors within larger intrusions and information system compromises. In order to practically evaluate the risks of information leakage trough the target organizations' employees, when performing a penetration test, an ethical hacker must consider social engineering as a very important aspect of the performed test. Social Engineering Toolkit (SET) is an integrated set of tools designed specifically to perform advanced attacks against the human element, and is the most advanced, if not the only toolkit of such kind that is publicly available as open source software. Incorporating many social engineering attack vectors, it heavily depends on Metasploit, an integrated penetration testing framework. This paper gives a brief introduction to the Social Engineering Toolkit software architecture, and provides an overview of supported attack vectors.