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.