Week 6: Social Engineering and Human Risk

This week shifts from software and systems to the human interface.

Garden State Cyber treats social engineering as a security problem built around trust, pressure, context, and process. You will analyze how a believable story can move a person toward an unsafe action and how good system design interrupts that sequence.

This week

Lesson 1: Social Engineering: The Human Interface

Identify urgency, authority, fear, helpfulness, scarcity, familiarity, and social proof. Map a seven-stage attack chain and practice independent verification.

Lesson 2: Reconstruct a Social-Engineering Attempt

Treat a synthetic interaction as evidence. Reconstruct the pretext, identify what is known and unknown, and design controls that stop the chain before the final request.

Lesson 3: Human-Risk Defense: Build Better Defaults

Move beyond "be careful." Build policy, technical controls, reporting, clean-desk/screen practices, ethical awareness exercises, and recovery procedures.

What you will produce

• influence map
• attack-chain reconstruction
• pretext analysis
• information-value map
• clean-desk/screen exposure table
• five-control human-risk stack
• Human-Risk Playbook

The standard for the week is:

Do not demand perfect users. Design a process that makes risky requests easier to verify, report, contain, and recover from.