social engineering

noun

Definition of social engineering

: management of human beings in accordance with their place and function in society : applied social science

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Examples of social engineering in a Sentence

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Former Metropolitan Council Chairman Peter Bell sees it as social engineering. — Elliot Kaufman, WSJ, "Housing Deregulation in Progressive Clothes," 21 Dec. 2018 But the suits say the sanctions amount to a ham-handed attempt at social engineering that backfired. — Douglas Belkin, WSJ, "Harvard Faces Lawsuits Over Sanctions on Single-Sex Clubs," 3 Dec. 2018 And all social engineering is based on emotional response. — Robert Mcmillan, WSJ, "How Hackers Talk Their Way Into Getting Company Secrets," 18 Sep. 2018 But because of the nature of MDM, successful takeover of devices would have required a substantial amount of social engineering to get users to go through all the steps voluntarily. — Sean Gallagher, Ars Technica, "Hyper-targeted attack against 13 iPhones dropped malicious apps via MDM," 13 July 2018 Known to security researchers as the Carbanak group, the group used social engineering and phishing attacks to infiltrate businesses and steal financial data. — Russell Brandom, The Verge, "Ukrainian hackers arrested for stealing 15 million credit card records," 1 Aug. 2018 Further Reading How a college student tricked 17k coders into running his sketchy script This isn’t the first time Python’s official PyPI repository has been abused to carry out this type of social engineering attack. — Dan Goodin, Ars Technica, "Two new supply-chain attacks come to light in less than a week," 23 Oct. 2018 Companies are getting wise to social engineering, however. — Robert Mcmillan, WSJ, "How Hackers Talk Their Way Into Getting Company Secrets," 18 Sep. 2018 Designed for security researchers performing social engineering attacks, the system automatically locates profiles on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other networks based on a name and picture. — Russell Brandom, The Verge, "New facial recognition tool tracks targets across different social networks," 8 Aug. 2018

These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'social engineering.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.