Social Engineering Penetration Testing

Chapter 9

The E-mail Attack Vector

Richard Ackroyd,    Senior Security Engineer, RandomStorm Limited

Phishing attacks are very popular for a reason, they work. RSA, one of the world’s leading Information Security organizations, was successfully breached in 2011 by exactly this kind of attack. This chapter will walk through the process and tools involved in creating a successful phishing attack as a part of a social engineering assessment, with a view to improving your client’s defenses.

Keywords

Phishing attacks; spear phishing; client side attack

Introduction

In Chapter 8, the topic of leveraging open source intelligence to augment our assessment was discussed. This included the harvesting of corporate e-mail addresses to use in our attacks. In ...