How Does Grooming Fit into Social Engineering?

Abstract

In this research, we propose to formally include the technique of grooming within the processes of social engineering, validating its insertion with the phases of social engineering designed by Kevin Mitnick. Scientific evidence has shown that grooming is the technique applied by child sexual harassers and research in this field has generated significant contributions in this study. Nevertheless, researchers do not interrelate the contributions generated by grooming and social engineering, which allows us to infer that the studies are isolated and incomplete and must be consolidated with complementary scientific evidence.