Social Engineering is the art of manipulating a person into revealing sensitive information. Social Engineering is the best hacking tool you can use, in my opinion. Similar to using a computer program to make another system spew out amounts of valuable information about the machine, that an attacker can later use. Think of it as "people hacking". When hacking into system you find a weakness or vulnerability that you can exploit, to gain access to restricted information. Social engineering is taking advantage of a persons weakness and getting them to disclose confidential information. All it takes is a large amount a confidence and basic knowledge of human nature and social behavior patterns. Social engineering does not just apply to computer security, it can apply to nearly any situation.
My examples in computer security include chatting with persons and make them split out their hobbies, interests and stuffs like that. It is surprising to see how people tend to put passwords that directly relate to what they like or what they do.
For example there is a great chance that a hardcore fan of transformers would set his passwords as the name of one of the decepticons, concepticons or whatever.
Another example is when you want to trick your friend into giving out his email password. Naturally no one will blatantly give out his password, but you can trick him as to make him split the answer to the secret question that allows resetting of an email password. (bat lakol )
Tip: Neva write something true while setting your secret answer.
This is just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to social engineering. There is much more to cover, but I hope you all learned something. Overtime you will become better at reading and understanding human nature. You will develop your own style of social engineering. There are many more methods that I left out, but these are great to start with. Knowing how to social engineer is a great way to prevent yourself from getting tricked by others. For example, the police use social engineering and forms of manipulation constantly. Others may disagree, but overall I feel this is an important topic to cover.