awesome-social-engineering
A curated "awesome list" of social-engineering resources — the human-knowledge counterpart to this spoke's AI-OSINT tools. By giuliacassara; CC-BY-4.0; ~4k★.
T3, re-tiered 2026-08-21 when ../QUALITY.md's catalogue clause was keyed to the claim rather
than the artifact. The old grade read "T4: a community-curated link list (a map of the field, not a
primary or analyzed source)" — graded on the shape of the thing, which is the reasoning that
amendment removed. The ladder now puts an unpublished-but-real curation at T3 and reserves T4 for a
list with no inclusion criteria at all. This one is sectioned, licensed CC-BY-4.0, and carries a
scope disclaimer naming security professionals and controlled environments; what it does not publish
is why any given entry is in it.
Still not an authority on what it links to. The persuasion texts, the phishing tooling and the training material carry their own tiers, and nothing here tests, ranks or dates them.
What it collects
- Psychology of influence — persuasion/manipulation texts (Cialdini; Chris Hadnagy; Kevin Mitnick).
- Phishing tooling — Gophish, King Phisher, Evilginx2, wifiphisher.
- OSINT / reconnaissance — Maltego, theHarvester, Shodan, Spiderfoot, recon-ng (the manual recon stack the AI-OSINT tools automate).
- Defense & community — the Social-Engineer portal, the Layer 8 conference.
- Training — courses (Udemy, PacktPub, Cybrary).
Its disclaimer scopes the material to security professionals, pentesters, and controlled-environment education.
Why it matters here
It supplies the spoke's human-element half and its manual-OSINT baseline: the Maltego/theHarvester/ Shodan stack it lists is exactly the reconnaissance that llm-osint and kallisto-osinter automate. So it grounds two of the spoke's pages at once — social-engineering (the attack discipline OSINT serves) and the before picture of the automation story. Catalogued to map the field and frame the ethics, not as an operational guide.