Which of the following is a social engineering technique?

The correct answer is A. Phishing. Phishing (A) is a social engineering technique because it manipulates people psychologically - typically through deceptive emails or websites - to trick them into revealing credentials or sensitive information, exploiting human trust rather than technical vulnerabilities. The…

Attacks and Countermeasures

Question

Options

APhishing
BFirewalking
Cport scanning
DTraffic analysis

How the community answered

(17 responses)

A
94% (16)
B
6% (1)

Explanation

Phishing (A) is a social engineering technique because it manipulates people psychologically - typically through deceptive emails or websites - to trick them into revealing credentials or sensitive information, exploiting human trust rather than technical vulnerabilities.

The distractors are all technical attack methods, not social engineering:

Firewalking (B) is a network reconnaissance technique that probes firewall rules by manipulating TTL values in packets.
Port scanning (C) uses tools like Nmap to discover open ports and services on a target system.
Traffic analysis (D) involves passively observing network traffic patterns to infer information about communications.

Memory tip: Social engineering targets people, not systems. If the technique exploits human psychology (trust, fear, urgency), it's social engineering. If it uses tools or packets to probe infrastructure, it's a technical attack. Phishing is the classic "people hack."

Topics

#Social Engineering#Phishing#Attack Vectors#Threat Identification

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