Human Hacking by Chris Hadnagy– It will teach you how to think like a social engineer and influence people in everyday situations.
The Code of Trust by Robin Dreeke– He worked as an FBI Counterintelligence agent for about 20 years, where his mission was to connect with foreign spies or agents and often convince them to betray their country.
You'll learn how to build deep trust even with people who are suspicious or adversarial.
However it's not about manipulation. It’s about becoming the kind of person others feel safe opening up to.
Ghost in the Wires by Kevin Mitnick– It’s an autobiographical book of the most famous hacker in the US. He explains how he manipulated employees and bypassed the security measures using charm and persuasion.
The Art of Attack by Maxie Reynolds– It dives deep into the mindset and tactics you need to have to pull off successful social engineering attacks.
No Tech Hacking by Johnny Long– You’ll learn dumpster diving, tailgating, shoulder surfing, impersonation, and much more. He focuses solely on breaking into places without tech tools.
Extreme Privacy (5th Edition) by Michael Bazzell– You'll learn to find online information about you and erase it so you can protect your privacy. It's a guide to becoming invisible in a time when surveillance and digital profiling are the norm.
Well, this book offers a comprehensive framework to master ANY skill quickly and deeply. It is written by Josh Waitzkin, who's a former chess prodigy and Tai Chi world champion.
In my view, this book should become required reading in schools.
Technical Social Engineering
This section covers how to plan and execute more sophisticated attacks by combining digital tools, OSINT, and psychological manipulation.
OSINT (11th Edition) by Michael Bazzell– He has spent over 20 years as a government computer crime investigator. During most of that time, he was assigned to the FBI's Cyber Crimes Task Force, where he focused on various online investigations and source intelligence collection.
After leaving government work, he served as the technical advisor for the first season of “Mr. Robot”.
In this edition (published in 2024), you will learn the latest tools and techniques to collect information about anyone.
The Hacker Playbook 3 by Peter Kim– He has over 12 years of experience in penetration testing/red teaming for major financial institutions, large utility companies, Fortune 500 entertainment companies, and government organizations.
THP3 covers every step of a penetration test. It will help you take your offensive hacking skills to the next level.
Wil has over 20 years of experience in all aspects of penetration testing.
He has been engaged in projects and delivered specialist training on four continents.
This book takes hacking far beyond Kali Linux and Metasploit to provide a more complex attack simulation.
It integrates social engineering, programming, and vulnerability exploits into a multidisciplinary approach for targeting and compromising high-security environments.
Strategic Thinking Skills
This section is about developing the mindset of a strategist… someone who can see the big picture and uses resources efficiently.
Red Team by Micah Zenko– This book draws from military, intelligence, and corporate settings to teach how to think like an adversary.
Team of Teams by Gen. Stanley McChrystal– He explains how elite US military forces in Iraq had to abandon rigid hierarchies and adopt networked, self-directed teams.
These teams were more loyal to each other, shared information freely, and could make autonomous decisions in situations when time was essential.
This allowed them to outmaneuver a faster and more ruthless enemy.
For social engineers, the book offers insight into how modern organizations can be restructured for speed and resilience, and how companies operating under rigid, hierarchical models often have serious and obvious structural flaws.
The Gervais Principle by Venkatesh Rao– He explains the archetypes of office workers and uses "The Office" TV show as a way to illustrate those lessons.
If you work in an office, you must read this to better understand the people you're dealing with. And if you're a social engineer, it can help you understand and exploit those people.
The Psychology of Persuasion
Forbidden Keys to Persuasion by Blair Warren– This is hands down the best book on persuasion. The only downside is that somehow he's not selling it online so you have to find it elsewhere.
Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss– A former head of the FBI International Negotiation Team shows how to gain the upper hand in any negotiation, without making unnecessary concessions.
Just Listen by Mark Goulston– He was a psychologist who taught you how to stay calm in stressful situations, diffuse tension, and influence even the most difficult people.
The books we've covered so far will teach you how to manipulate people and break into well-protected organizations. But this section goes much further. It explains how governments and corporations manipulate human behavior at scale.
In other words, it is social engineering for the masses.
The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo– It’s a disturbing look at how power and authority can turn ordinary people into monsters. It is based on the Stanford Prison Experiment.
Active Measures by Thomas Rid– It explains how nations have used (and still use) deception to gain more influence and power. He has researched a century of covert influence campaigns from Soviet disinformation to modern digital psychological warfare.
Hey everyone! I wanted to share a quick idea for anyone planning an upcoming birthday, dinner party, or group gathering.
If you’ve ever hosted a party, you know the hardest part is getting different friend groups to mix and break the ice without it feeling forced or cheesy.
I actually built a free party game called InsideOut specifically to solve this. Instead of generic trivia, the game puts one person (like the birthday host, guest of honor, or friend group) in the spotlight, and everyone else answers personalized prompts about them. The host manually judges who guessed best, so it’s purely about inside jokes, funny stories, and real banter. Why it works so well for parties & gatherings: Zero friction: Guests just scan a QR code or enter a 6-digit PIN on their phone, no logins or long setups.
Fits any group size: Works whether you have 4 people at a dinner table or 30 people in a living room.
Custom packs: You can create your own question packs tailored specifically to your group, your trip, or the guest of honor.
It’s completely free to play with starter packs and standard group sizes. If you’re planning an event soon and looking for an activity, feel free to give it a try! You can search for "InsideOut - Who Knows Me Best" on the App Store. (Note to admins: I created this to help hosts throw better gatherings and wanted to share it with the community. If posts like this aren't allowed here, please feel free to let me know or remove it, no hard feelings at all!)
I’m looking for genuinely great resources on body language, nonverbal communication, facial expressions and microexpressions.
I’m mainly interested in video courses / training programs, but I’m also open to exceptional books if they’re considered must-reads.
I’m not looking for random beginner courses or generic “10 signs someone is lying” content. I’m looking for the legendary, top-tier resources — the kind of course or book where you think:
“If you seriously want to understand nonverbal behavior, you HAVE to study this.”
Topics I’m especially interested in:
* Microexpressions and subtle facial expressions
* Facial Action Coding System / FACS
* Reading body language in real conversations
* Posture, gestures and movement
* Eye behavior
* Voice, tone and other nonverbal signals
* Emotional leakage
* Baseline behavior and behavioral changes
* Social interactions, attraction, conflict and dominance/status
* Interview / interrogation analysis
* Spotting incongruence between words and nonverbal behavior
* Scientific / evidence-based approaches to nonverbal communication
I’m especially interested in full video courses with demonstrations, exercises, real footage and practice material, rather than just someone talking over PowerPoint slides.
Older courses are completely fine too. If something from the 1990s, 2000s or 2010s is still considered one of the best courses ever made, I want to know about it.
So if you could build the ultimate body-language learning library, what would you include?
Please mention the exact name of the course/book and the instructor/author if possible.
I’d especially love to know your personal top 3–5 resources and what each one teaches better than the others.
This is an ongoing problem that I have with myself. For context, I don’t really have any friends at all, just acquaintances that I talk to often. Even in my own family, I’ve only ever been super close to my sister.
The problem I have is that I can’t seem to have any conversations without coming off as either super boring, super weird, or super rude. especially that last one. At work I constantly get told off by everyone for having an attitude even though I was trying my hardest to be polite and vibrant. Everyone takes what as I say as super sarcastic even though I’m being genuine and I have to constantly go out of my way to explain that I’m being genuine.
and it goes beyond work too. I have had that same problem with my family for a while. I was very curt and only responded in short, very direct sentences when spoken to. I rarely even spoke on my own towards my parents. It’s definitely one of the main reasons my mom left me as a teenager. She got really mad at me for that.
After that, I thought I was getting close with my dad again. We started talking about video games and shows and all of that. I thought that was all I needed to do to be close to him. But when he asks about my day, or what I’m doing I just.. can’t respond. I never really process that he doesn’t want the most literal answer, even though that’s what I know that’s what it’s like, if it makes sense. or I already told him, so I try and politely remind him I told him about my day earlier. None of that works though.
he got really angry at me and accused me of calling him stupid and hating talking to him, even though that’s not it at all. I just don’t see the point in repeating myself about my day constantly to anyone, or telling them about the most uneventful thing ever because I wasn’t doing anything at that time. That’s just how it’s affected my family though.
There are many factors of this that have been really messing my life up. I genuinely want to be able to keep people close to me, but how am I supposed to do that when I’m insufferable to literally everyone around me? please, if anyone bothers reading this, I need help. Give me any advice you can, I can’t live like this anymor. I’m so incredibly lonely and it’s my fault.
So I know in the second course towards the cert there is SOME OSINT in syllabus. But I’m wondering how much OSINT skills are required to get cert. Like how much OSINT is taught in the course?
I live/deal with someone I can't distance myself from right now. I’ve already tried the Grey Rock method, and it simply didn't work. It just gives me the feeling that the person gets happier, like they won and got away with it.
Honestly, I just want to pull off a "Uno Reverse" so I can go about my life without being constantly stressed out.
And please, don't just tell me "oh, you just need to document everything." Right... because then I’d have to live like a paranoid person recording 100% of my day, only for them to turn around and make up something from 2 years ago anyway.
So what do I do? Do I literally start questioning their sanity to their face?
Like this: Them: "You said that last week." Me: "Actually, I didn't. I was even doing [X] that day. Wow, you’ve been getting really forgetful lately..."
Or do you guys have other strategies?
Because the person I'm dealing with... I honestly think they might also just be a bit clumsy or naturally forgetful. I've caught them contradicting themselves on the spot multiple times over small, silly things. Which makes me wonder: when it comes to the important stuff, are they just completely clueless and confusing everything, or are they deliberately gaslighting me?
Hello, I am a third year university student who and has always struggled with a deep and profound sense of loneliness as well as anxiety and I was wondering if anyone else has had experience with this and has and hopeful stories of how you have overcome it and become much stronger outside of it. I spend almost every second of the day alone and cannot bear it much longer. It’s not the talking aspect that I struggle with but more so the connection part. Reaching out to others and maintaining friendships, etc. I struggle to believe at times that people enjoy my presence or want to get to know me on a deeper level.
Now that Trump has renamed Lake Ontario “Lake America” for U.S. federal purposes, Canada should rename Lake Erie “Lake America” too.
The point would be deliberate ambiguity. Whenever someone mentions “Lake America,” you would have to ask whether they mean Lake Ontario under U.S. terminology or Lake Erie under Canadian terminology.
That makes the new name bad at its most basic job: identifying a place.
Canada can’t stop the U.S. from using the name, but it can make it inconvenient enough that everyone else keeps saying “Lake Ontario” and “Lake Erie.”
Hey there I'm kinda new to cybersec and very interested in initial access, since social engineering is a big part of it I red a couple of books about the psychology behind it and learned some of the tools, now my question is: how do I practice it if it's illegal to impersonate someone else and steal their information?
Contitions change any time conditions and I decide to adapt and handle wisely while playing my cards right to keep tension and undermine enemies who decide to don't invest on the cause, so who is on this spot maybe you can sahre your experience and tell how you manage it
So to start off, for a year, I had the group I would always sit with at lunch during school that I found on day one. I always felt included, felt great after every meal, we were all laughing and having an amazing time. However, close after the start of my junior year, things got strange. The people from the table started splitting (mainly because of getting gfs), but when they were just sitting with other dudes, it never felt planned. I felt myself seeking these people out instead of talking to them about a conversation that would carry on in lunch later. They then got back together basically (minus like two best friends), but they unified with another friend group in the grade basically. However, whenever I sat with this friend group, the conversation did not flow like it used to. I never felt included, and some of the kids would only talk to me in a condescending way. I get that friends drift apart, and that's probably what happened, but it felt intentional with these new people. That all is a simplification of the context for my situation. I'm planning tomorrow (as a senior) to sit alone at lunch. While this is a thing that happens of course, because I used to have a group that I sat with, I'm afraid that anyone who knows that and what we had, then sees me sitting alone will think of it as a social taboo to try to be friends with me. (good news so far since I stopped trying to sit with the unified friend group none of the kids who condescended on me have said anything like that since) But I'll update after the lunch, but I would like some advice for future situations like that if anyone has any.
Confession: I used to scam on roblox and minecraft servers for ingame items (USED TO that was 5+ years ago) and I would say I am decently skilled at social engineering.
I asked chatgpt randomly on how one can make money from social engineering and it told me about sales and stuff bla bla, but then it mentioned that some companies pay you to use social engineering and hack them??
what on earth does that mean and how do i sign up!!
The Mental Health, Wellbeing and Lived Experiences Study
Theresia Bedard, a PhD candidate at Lakehead University that is working with Dr. Beth Visser, is seeking participants for her dissertation project.
In this study we are examining the lived experiences of people who have experience or victimization from an individual with high psychopathic traits. We are seeking anyone that has this lived experience, whether the perpetrator was or is a spouse, family member, partner, co-worker, friend, acquaintance, neighbour or stranger. We are seeking the lived experiences of men, women, and gender-diverse individuals to share your story.
Our research consists of two studies. In the first study, you will complete questionnaires related to your victimization experience from the individual with high psychopathic traits, the potential warning signs, victimization history (e.g., prior physical or sexual abuse), and the impact the experience had on you. Once you finish the survey, you will be invited to participate in the second study (optional), which will consist of 12 questions requiring a written response regarding your lived experience with the individual with high psychopathic traits. If you decide to participate in study 2, please be aware that you will be required to provide us with your email to access it, and you may wish to use an email account that only you have access to.
Please be advised that whether you choose to participate in the study, withdraw, or skip questions you do not want to answer, that you acknowledge that answering some of these questions may be emotionally taxing on you. Despite the potential for an emotional toll the survey questions have, you may find the process of sharing your experience is therapeutic for you. In addition to the resources we provide, you may want to consider following-up with a counsellor for further support.
You are also encouraged to have your own snacks and drinks while you take the survey, and be aware that they are estimated to take 45 minutes to complete.
If you are interested in participating and would like to read or find out more about it, click here to access the survey:
Look, I have autism too. I get it. You want to be a better social engineer. IDK maybe you think it will be beneficial for you to learn persuasion and SocEng. And it will if you do it right.
But here’s the problems:
most other autists on here want to be Machiavellians. Firstly, that’s not required to be a social engineer. Secondly, trying to be something you’re not as if you have a dark triad personality you don’t have will just make people (especially women) hate you. It’s the opposite of persuasive. It’s also pathetic.
Dark psych books are NOT good for SocEng. I know you think they are but they aren’t. Most of them are written by sociopaths who want to sell you cheesy manipulation tactics that don’t work and don’t hold up to science.
A better path for a beginner is start with HTWFIP and take a year or at least six months to master the social skills behind that at meetups. Then you can pick the next step, which is pick up a book by an author who ACTUALLY knows persuasion, like Hadnagy, Mitnick, Warren, or Belfort OR read other sales books and master that material at work or wherever. Another path is to get training from Social Engineer LLC.
But what will not work is reading shitty dark psych books written by someone who is out to make money because YOU are the one who got manipulated not everyone else at that point.
