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.
talking to people is genuinely hard for me. talking to my parents about anything serious, speaking up in the office, presentations, any conversation where something is at stake, i struggle with all of it.
so what i do is rehearse it in my head beforehand. i plan out what i'll say, imagine how it'll go, feel kind of ready. and then in the actual conversation the other person says something i didn't expect, and i just get stuck. my brain goes blank, i say something random that isn't even what i meant, and from there the whole thing falls apart. the point i wanted to make never lands and i walk away feeling like an idiot. weak. like i couldn't hold my own in a simple conversation.
the rehearsing in my head doesn't work because in my head i control both sides. real people don't follow the script.
i started using gpt to practice, like telling it to act as the other person so i could try the conversation out loud first. but honestly it's shit. it just agrees with everything, folds the second i push, never pushes back the way a real person would, and gives me these long generic life-coach paragraphs instead of actually being the person i'm trying to talk to. it doesn't feel real at all so it doesn't help.
does anyone actually have a way to practice this stuff? how do you get better at not freezing when a conversation goes somewhere you didn't plan for?
So I've been on a few dates and had some good phone conversations, but I'm hitting a wall with sexual tension. I know my dates want me to lead and escalate things, but I genuinely don't know how to do that without it feeling awkward. I just let the tension and eventually our conversation die.
It is quite apparent now that reddit has been fully taken over with the rest of social media. The ads and algorithm and bad actors have really diminished what it used to be.
My question is if there are any documented cases of such actors waging campaigns on reddit.
I can't help but feel like some threads are just full of one sided outrage on certain charged topics. Any examples in the news or leaked Intel etc?
I've always wondered why every AI chat app feels the same.
You open it, ask a question, close the tab... and the entire world freezes until you come back.
I wanted the opposite.
So I started building Living Feed.
Instead of an assistant waiting for prompts, it's a self-hostable social world where around 100 AI characters continuously live their own lives.
They:
write posts
reply to each other
build friendships
hold grudges
remember past events
send you DMs first
continue living even if nobody logs in
You're not the protagonist.
You're simply another person entering an already living world.
Every like, comment or DM slightly changes relationships, and those relationship changes create new stories later. Characters remember what happened instead of resetting every conversation.
Technically it's built around:
Event Sourcing
CQRS
PostgreSQL as the source of truth
NATS JetStream
FastAPI
Next.js
Docker Compose
Local Ollama or hosted LLMs
A simulation engine that continuously advances the world instead of generating isolated chats
The project is MIT licensed and fully open source.
Machiavelli wrote this 500 years ago: "The deceiver will always find someone ready to be deceived."
Neuroscience has finally caught up. And the findings are uncomfortable.
Your brain isn't built to detect lies. It's built to trust. Here's exactly how convincing liars exploit that — and why being smarter makes you more vulnerable, not less.
When someone makes you feel seen — when they remember the small things, mirror your language, make you feel understood — your brain releases oxytocin. The bonding hormone. It doesn't ask questions. It just opens the door.
Once your brain decides someone is trustworthy, it protects that decision. New evidence that contradicts it gets filtered out. Explained away. This isn't weakness. This is how every human brain is built.
Convincing liars exploit this in three specific ways — mirroring, strategic truth, and intermittent reinforcement. The last one is the most dangerous.
Does who know about cold approach understand that unless you possess statues or beauty or power then you won’t be able to do direct approach.
So observational/ opinion/ engineering interaction
Are most suitable
They had my SIM card packaging with all serial codes/IDs. They know my phone number and I think they might socially engineer their way with customer service to gain access to the account. I fear this could easily be done by getting the representative to change the email to access the account. Or by taking off the line lock on the call or when they access through the app. Then they could maybe change back the email as I wouldn't even get an alert of it being changed.
I am so frustrated right now and it's a very complicated situation. I worry they could even clone my sim at this point and compromise everything in my iPhone/iCloud/location.
I have read of so many stories of how people can clone SIM cards or use the ID numbers to socially engineer with these phone representatives at Total Wireless. I am prepared to just throw away all my devices and start new but I want to know better the how this potentially could work for someone who has my SIM card IDs.
This is worse than a simple breakup - it’s damning social exclusion and feels like the end of the world and my ego will never come back from it. On top of anything social, I’ve never loved a person more and can’t imagine my life without him.
My boyfriend (40m) ended things after 8 months and one of the reasons he gave was that his friends felt that they ‘didn’t get us together’ and that ‘he didn’t seem himself around them’.
They apparently said they only invited me because I was dating him, and he admitted he’d also started feeling like he wasn’t fully himself with me. He named two people (both of which are snobs on the LA art scene) and who barely know me, as well as a few close friends he wouldn’t name who said ‘they only invited me because i was his girlfriend.’ It’s crushing. I am ruminating and spiraling.
Not only do I adore him with my entire being; he’s a major social connector in the Berlin/LA art-tech scene. This is the exact world I want to be a part of, and he’s a gatekeeper. Almost all of my community there came through him. He’s currently at an artist residency surrounded by exactly the people he thrives with, and said being there made him realize we’re incompatible.
It feels like more than heartbreak. It feels like I’ve been expelled from an entire world and future I thought I was becoming part of.
\*\*he said he would rather be lovers but no longer committed boyfriend/girlfriend because he wants me to be a part of his life and doesn’t want to lose me. Just to soften the blow.
I work at a hotel and theres a competition to see who can sign most people up for rewards membership. I could just make them easy without customer knowing. Theres absolutely 0 price and all they can get is good things. Or I could persuade them into joining. Its very easy and takes no time. When people ask me to sign up for something I automatically say no, but what would get u to say yez?
Hey everyone , I’ve noticed how when life feels heavy and consuming we tend to take breaks and sometimes pull away from people who actually care, and is okay to take a moment, how about we do it mindfully without others questioning where they stand in our lives .
I built a web app, where you can add it to your home screen as an app, it helps with communication and building healthy relationships with friends, partners and families. Reminds you to check on people you care about based on your own intervals and celebrate little achievements with them and throughout the day you can send thoughtful thoughts to people you care about . You can create stories or journals with people you are linked with .
You sign up and invite those who you wish to connect with , and when burnouts hit or you need a moment you can show that you need space and they can see it and respect it with no questions asked , they can’t text you but send a quick message that does not expect a response , Is like an optimised do not disturb . (https://heartbeat-sage.vercel.app/)
This is not another social media platform but a private space for your inner circle.
I've been on some dates lately and want to level up my presence. I'm specifically looking to be more playful and fun to be around, build a flirty warm vibe, and make the other person feel comfortable and charmed.
Are there any books that break down what fun chemistry actually looks like in practice? Not looking for PUA, just solid frameworks on rapport, playfulness, and social calibration. Any recs?
Made a video exploring the psychology behind master manipulators — the specific tactics they use, how they select targets, and why even intelligent people fall for it. Would love to hear thoughts from this community.
As an independent researcher with a PhD in Behavioral Neuroscience, I am currently running an online experiment to test if a quick cognitive intervention can neutralize social engineering baits. Preliminary data suggests that encouraging a recipient to reduce a lure to its objective features—first isolating the exact physical command and second distilling the message into a neutral essence—deactivates the amygdala and engages prefrontal cortex reality-monitoring areas. By enabling the recipient to see the bait strictly "as-is," this behavioral patch could overcome the emotional triggers targeted by hackers and the rising threat of hyper-convincing deepfakes.
Does this neurobiological approach map to your experiences with security training - do you think this approach is sufficient to resist live lures? What flaws or limitations do you see?
Thank you
PS. I can send you a brief example of how this cognitive translation works in practice, if you wish
