Define social engineering and briefly describe how it is accomplished.

What will be an ideal response?

Within the context of information security, social engineering is the process of using social skills to convince people to reveal access credentials or other valuable information to the attacker. This can be done in several ways, and usually involves the perpetrator posing as a person higher in the organizational hierarchy than the victim. To prepare for this false representation, the perpetrator may have used social engineering against others in the organization to collect seemingly unrelated information that, when used together, makes the false representation more credible.