Social engineering is the "technique to influence" and "persuasion to deceive "people to obtain the information or perform some action. Social engineers exploit the natural tendency of a person to trust social engineers' word, rather than exploiting computer security holes. It is generally agreed that people are the weak link in security and this principle makes social engineering possible. A social engineer usually uses telecommunication (i.e., telephone and/or cell phone) or Internet to get them to do something that is against the security practices and/or policies of the organization.

Social engineering involves gaining sensitive information or unauthorized access privileges by building inappropriate trust relationships with insiders. It is an art of exploiting the trust of people, which is not doubted while speaking in a normal manner. The goal of a social engineer is to fool someone into providing valuable information or access to that information. Social engineer studies the human behavior so that people will help because of the desire to be helpful, the attitude to trust people, and the fear of getting into trouble. The sign of truly successful social engineers is that they receive information without any suspicion.

A simple example is calling a user and pretending to be someone from the service desk working on a network. issue; the attacker then proceeds to ask questions about what the user is working on, what file shares he/she uses, what his/her password is, and so on.