Mozella L. McCoy-Flowers
Cybersecurity & Digital Forensics
This lab demonstrates how social engineering attacks are executed using the Social Engineering Toolkit (SET) and how defenders can identify and prevent credential harvesting attacks.
Social engineering is the use of psychological manipulation to trick users into revealing sensitive information.
- Trust
- Urgency
- Authority
- Human error
service apache2 stop
setoolkit
In SET, select:
- Social-Engineering Attacks
- Website Attack Vectors
- Credential Harvester Attack Method
Choose the desired website template (for example, Google or Facebook) from the SET menu.
ifconfig eth0Use the IP address shown for eth0 as the listener/redirect IP in SET.
Confirm your selections in SET and start the attack to clone and host the phishing page.
On a client/victim machine, browse to:
http://<your-ip>
Enter test credentials into the fake login page.
Review the SET console output or log files to view captured credentials.
- Fake or unusual login pages
- Suspicious or lookalike domains
- Unexpected prompts for credentials or MFA codes
Technical controls
- SPF, DKIM, and DMARC on email domains
- Email filtering and sandboxing
- Endpoint Detection and Response (EDR)
- Web proxy and URL filtering
Human-focused controls
- Security awareness training
- Regular phishing simulations
- Clear reporting channels for suspicious emails
- T1566 – Phishing
- Credential Access techniques
- Data Collection techniques
- Social engineering analysis
- Linux command-line usage
- Threat detection mindset
- Cybersecurity documentation
This lab is for educational purposes only.
All activities were conducted in a controlled lab environment.
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