The Social Engineer Toolkit

by Jago Maniscalchi // October 27, 2010 // Exploits and Malware // No comments

The Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET) is specifically designed to perform advanced attacks against the human element. SET was designed to be released with the http://www.social-engineer.org launch and has quickly became a standard tool in a penetration testers arsenal. SET was written by David Kennedy (ReL1K) and with a lot of help from the community it has incorporated attacks never before seen in an exploitation toolset. The attacks built into the toolkit are designed to be targeted and focused attacks against a person or organization used during a penetration test.

SET is a menu driven based attack system, which is fairly unique when it comes to hacker tools. The decision not to make it command line was made because of how social-engineer attacks occur; it requires multiple scenarios, options, and customizations. If the tool had been command line based it would have really limited the effectiveness of the attacks and the inability to fully customize it based on your target. Let’s dive into the menu and do a brief walkthrough of each attack vector.

About the Author

Jago Maniscalchi is a Cyber security consultant, though he tries to avoid the word "Cyber" at all costs. He has spent 15 years working with Information Systems and has experience in website hosting, software engineering, infrastructure management, data analysis and security assessment. Jago lives in London with his family, enough pets to start a small zooalogical society, and a Samsung NaviBot Robotic Vacuum Cleaner. Despite an aptitude for learning computer languages, his repeated attempts to learn Italian have resulted in spectacular failure.