Social engineering attacks are a type of cybercrime designed to exploit human weakness by using psychological manipulation to trick individuals into divulging sensitive information or performing actions that may be against their own interests. Financially motivated, the goal of these attacks is usually to gain access to confidential information or systems that the threat actors can then leverage for fraudulent or malicious purposes.
The rapid growth and popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter has wrought a seismic and lasting change to the Internet. The Web has evolved from a source of static information to a proxy of real world interaction.