Social Engineering: Recommended Resources for 2022

2 min readNov 19, 2018

From time to time, I get asked about what resources I recommend for learning about social engineering. Here is my list:

Rapport & Influence

It’s Not All About “Me” by Robin Dreeke: Book written by a former FBI agent who specialized in developing informants. Great advice for striking up a conversation and building rapport — fast. Short read. Great advice for all sorts of life situations.
Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion by Robert Cialdini: You will never look the same at Hari Krishna at the airport or waiters in the restaurant.
The Jordan Harbinger Show: Podcast on honing social skills in business. Lots of cross-over to social engineering.
Charisma on Command YouTube channel: Great content on social skills, such as first impressions, confident voice tips, and telling good stories. Very applicable to business setting.

FBI Elicitation Techniques: Written to help people protect against elicitation attempts, this is actually a pretty good 2-page guide on how to do it.

Open Source Intelligence Techniques by Michael Bazzell: Turbo-charge your OSINT-fu to dig into accounts faster. Also check out https://inteltechniques.com/ containing many search tools by the author.
OSINTCurio.us website and podcast covers new tools and techniques as well as applications to different walks of life.
Trace Labs lets you apply your OSINT expertise on real-life missing person cases, either in the monthly cases or timed competitions. Results get filted, sorted, and passed on to law enforcement.

What Every BODY is Saying by Joe Navarro: Great primer on body language by a former FBI counter-intelligence interrogator. Also a fun read is Three Minutes to Doomsday by the same author.
Face Basics micro expressions certification by Paul Ekman: Ever seen the TV show “Lie to me”? It’s modeled after Paul Ekman. This $99 online course and certification is what law enforcement agents go through as well. Plus, you can post it on your LinkedIn profile.
Center for Body Language: Free courses for micro expressions. Also check out Patryk Wezowski’s YouTube channel.

MarketingExperiments: No a site about phishing per se, but a great resource to understand how to make people click on links. This site runs scientific experiments running A/B tests on emails, landing pages, and ads, which may sound strangely familiar if you’ve ever written a phishing email, but with a scientific twist.

Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick: In the 90s, Kevin used social engineering to successfully hack companies and government agencies and ran from the FBI before spending 5 years in prison. Today, he’s a consultant and public speaker. You can find his talks on YouTube. Great examples of how social engineering can cause breaches.
Video of my winning Defcon call: My recorded reenactment of the call that helped me win the Social Engineering Capture the Flag (SECTF) competition at Defcon.