TrustedSec believes that social-engineering is one of the hardest attacks to protect against and now one of the most prevalent. The Social-Engineer Toolkit has over 2 million downloads and is aimed at leveraging advanced technological attacks in a social-engineering type environment. With over two million downloads, SET is the standard for social engineering penetration tests and supported heavily within the security community. SET has been presented at large-scale conferences including Blackhat, Derbåon, Defcon, and ShmooCon. It is an open-source Python-driven tool aimed at penetration testing around Social-Engineering. The Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET) was created and written by the founder of TrustedSec. If the tool had been command-line based it would have really limited the effectiveness of the attacks and the inability to fully customize it based on your target. The decision not to make it a command line was made because of how social-engineer attacks occur it requires multiple scenarios, options, and customizations. SET is a menu-driven based attack system, which is fairly unique when it comes to hacker tools.
The attacks built into the toolkit are designed to be focused on attacks against a person or organization used during a penetration test.
SET is written by David Kennedy (ReL1K) and with a lot of help from the community, it has incorporated attacks never before seen in an exploitation toolset. SET has quickly become a standard tool in a penetration testers arsenal. The Social-Engineer Toolkit (SET) is specifically designed to perform advanced attacks against the human element.