T H E   S O C I A L - E N G I N E E R  

T O O L K I T

The Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET) was developed to 
coincide with the release of Social-Engineer.org, a set 
of resources conceived by Chris Hadnagy (loganWHD) 
and written by one of this book’s authors, David 
Kennedy. The site offers a centralized location for 
social-engineering tutorials and explains terminologies, 
definitions, and scenarios that can help prepare you 
for hacking the human mind.

The purpose of SET is to fill a gap in the penetration testing community 

and bring awareness to social-engineering attacks. And it has succeeded—
SET has been downloaded 1 million times and is now an industry standard for 
deploying social-engineering attacks. The toolkit attacks human weaknesses, 
exploiting curiosity, credibility, avarice, and simple human stupidity. Social-
engineering attacks are at an all-time high and have always been a large risk 
for many organizations.