What is pretexting? How pretexting works exactly

Introduction

In this post, you will learn what is pretexting and how pretextings works exactly and also we will see an example of pretexting. Pretextings is a social engineering attack. If you don’t know what is social engineering attack visit here.

What is pretexting?

Pretexting is a type of social engineering attack. As I said pretexting is a type of social engineering attack which means the attack is directly related to humans. The primary target in pretextings is to steal credentials or steal money or even doing a privilege escalation.

The pretext is a kind of phishing attack but it is not phishing because there is no malicious link or any other in the mail. From the term “Pretext” we could understand the content is pretexted. which means the plan the cybercriminals going to execute is pre-designed in the form of text.

So, In this attack, the cybercriminals are going to use text and a dram concept. Pretextings works by acting like someone. Let’s see an example in the second section on how pretextings works.

How pretexting works?

Pretexting means putting pressure on the user. In simple words, the hacker would do some research about the company, write a lie in the mail and send it to the company and ask for money as their own company manager.

At this stage, the company staff will deposit the money in the account. As the mail came from the company managers account.

But in reality that isn’t company managers mail. Take a look at the below example even you would get confused. And this is a kind of called pretextings.

Not only this kind there are many other ways a pretext can be done. But the role here is acting as someone else. Often many get confused with pseudo-anonymity and pretextings but remember they are totally different.

Pretexting is 100% criminal activity but pseudo-anonymity is not a criminal activity to an extinct.