How can I understand if I am being targeted by a grey hat social engineer?
And if I fail, what approaches exist to detect social engineering attacks being in progress within an organisation?
How can I understand if I am being targeted by a grey hat social engineer?
And if I fail, what approaches exist to detect social engineering attacks being in progress within an organisation?
The reason that social engineering is as successful and popular as it is, is because there is no "catch all" approach to identifying a social engineer attack.
Approaches to identify social engineering attacks within an organization, typically (in my experience) involve getting the attacker to try to identify things that only a legitimate caller would know (security questions). It's debatable how secure this approach is, however it's still widely employed and used by many companies. Technologies like two factor authentication can help as well, but again these technologies rely on not having a "weak" human that can over-ride their processes.
Social Engineers will attempt to play off your emotions as a human. Most humans have a distinct nature in wanting to help those who need help, so it's common for social engineer experts to create a scenario whereby you pity them and may circumvent proper security procedures to help them. Another tactic is to get very angry and irate at someone in hopes that they'll provide the attacker what they want because most humans don't like being yelled at, and many don't like any sort of confrontation.
Perhaps the worst part is, if an attacker has done their research and knows their lingo and security questions of their would-be victim, you'd probably have no idea you had been socially engineered. Many companies have staff follow security procedures but if an attacker knows those procedures and has figured out a way to circumvent them, you'll likely find yourself out of luck