"Social Engineering" is a term in computing technology which is a very dangerous practice of hacking personal and confidential information from a person like knowing his password, online bank account details, IDs etc.

A social engineer is a fraud who uses programming skills and other hacker techniques to obtain the confidential information. Clearly speaking, Social Engineering is nothing but an illegal practice to obtain personal and confidential information through telephone or Internet.

Social Engineering has different faces. There can even be an instance where a social engineer disguised as a customer might try to acquire business or company information through phone or through internet advertisement.

The most commonly used techniques of Social Engineering are imitation and phone calls. The fraudster will at first pretend to be a customer and gets details like phone numbers, supervisor's name and other "non-sensitive” information and later wearing the identity of an internal employee he cons other employees to get passwords, internal phone numbers etc.

The Social Engineer may even maintain a good relationship with the internal employees to acquire any business secrets from him later. This may sometimes even lead to emotional blackmailing or exploiting the emotions and weaknesses of an individual.

Social Engineering is considered to be the most hazardous scam for companies which cannot be prevented even by Antivirus software.

Best Wishes,