Social Engineering

In Short

• The aim of this course is to provide students with basic knowledge of social engineering and human-based cyberattacks (see the ICS0018 Course Guide for details). The course is held by the IT College of Tallinn University of Technology and is primarily meant for students of Cyber Security Engineering, but other students interested in the human side of cybersecurity can also benefit from it.
• The course can be held in contact or e-learning mode (and possibly some hybrid way as well). Due to large number of visiting students from EuroTEQ, the Spring 2023 run is a full e-course (again see the guide for details). Note: this run is the first under the aegis of the university (it was run once in 2018 as part of the earlier IT College curriculum) - some irregularities can be expected!
• Course code: ICS0018
• Lecturers: Kaido Kikkas (lectures/discussions + overall coordination; User:Kaido.kikkas, ETIS) and Kristjan Karmo (seminars/discussions and hands-on tasks; User:Krkarm, LinkedIn).
• Programme: at the Study Information System - unfortunately, it only shows the Estonian version, an updated English-language programme is available here.
• Volume: 3 ECTS credit points
• Grading: Pass/fail

Course Information

• Course Guide
• Netiquette
• Library
• Hands-on seminars
• CotW seminars

Announcements

• The course kick-off (first lecture, including course intro) will take place on Wednesday, Feb 1 at 14.00 (2PM) Tallinn time (NB! 13.00 in Central Europe!) in the MS Teams environment of the university. The participation invitations will be delivered to all students whose Uni-ID is registered shortly before the event.

Topics, Materials and Notes

As the course is new, we will keep tuning the materials - thus they will appear here either before or soon after every lecture session.

• Week 1 (Feb 1) lecture: Course introduction + Introduction to Social Engineering (lecture slides: OpenDocument, [1])
• Week 2 (Feb 8) lecture: Information gathering
• Week 3 (Feb 15) lecture: Elicitation
• Week 4 (Feb 22) lecture: Pretexting
• Week 5 (Mar 1) lecture: Psychology in social engineering
• Week 6 (Mar 8) lecture: Influence and persuasion
• Week 7 (Mar 15) lecture: The Way of the Ninja
• Week 8 (Mar 22) lecture: Prevention, mitigation and counters

Frequently Asked Questions

• Q: Where can I find information about the course (tasks, grading etc)?
• A: from the Course Guide
• ...