Social Engineering: Wake Up

Social engineering is an attack vector that relies heavily on human interaction and often involves tricking people into breaking normal security procedures. 

A social engineer runs what used to be called a "con game." Techniques such as appeal to vanity, appeal to authority and appeal to greed are often used in social engineering attacks. Many social engineering exploits simply rely on people's willingness to be helpful. For example, the attacker might pretend to be a co-worker who has some kind of urgent problem that requires access to additional network resources.