Social engineering isn’t science fiction — it’s one of the most effective forms of cyberattack. This article shows how a simple phishing tool like Zphisher can steal your passwords, and how you can protect yourself and others.

🧠Why You Need to Read This?
Have you ever clicked on a link that seemed fishy but irresistible? Perhaps it stated you’d won a gift, provided a discount, or requested a password reset?

That’s social engineering at work — deceiving humans rather than cracking machines.

In this article, I guide you through a live phishing attack simulation utilizing Zphisher, a formidable open-source hacking tool.

⚠️ Disclaimer: This article is intended solely for educational and awareness purposes. The demonstration was conducted in a controlled environment with prior knowledge and consent. Unauthorized use of phishing techniques is both illegal and unethical. The intent is to illustrate how easily digital identities can be compromised — and more importantly, how such attacks can be identified and avoided.

🎭 What Is Social Engineering?
Social engineering is a psychological manipulation technique used by cybercriminals to trick you into providing sensitive information such as passwords, OTPs, and bank details.

🧨Common Types of Social Engineering:
1. Phishing — Bulk emails or messages with counterfeit links

2. Spear Phishing — Individual attacks on persons

3. Whaling — Attacking executives and high-value individuals

4. Smishing — Phishing through SMS

5. Vishing — Voice phishing

6. Quid Pro Quo — Bogus rewards for data

🛠️ Zphisher: The Attacker’s Tool
Zphisher is a phishing tool that automatically mimics the login pages of popular websites, including Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Gmail, and many more. It is commonly used for ethical hacking and cybersecurity awareness training.

📲 Step-by-Step Phishing Attack Using Zphisher

Let’s pretend how an average attacker would use Zphisher to steal credentials. Here we are using Kali Linux Virtual machine.

🔧 Step 1: Installing Zphisher

Open a terminal on Kali Linux or any Debian-based system, and run the following git command to clone the Zphisher tool to your machine.

git clone https://github.com/htr-tech/zphisher.git

Execute the “ls” command to see the “zphisher” under the root. Now we need to get inside the folder and execute the zphisher.sh with following commands.

cd zphisher
bash zphisher.sh

🕵️‍♂️ Step 2: Choose the Target Platform

Once the bash command is executed, we can see the CLI version of the Zphisher page running in the terminal, displaying a list of platforms to target.

Let’s choose Facebook for this simulation and type 1 under “Select an option”.

Select the type of page you want to create with a fake link. I have chosen the Traditional Login Page.

🌐 Step 3: Create the Phishing Link

Then it will ask do you want to run the phishing attack locally or through cloudflared or LocalXpose. As this is for educational purposes, we shall choose local execution and select “1” as the option, then it will ask for creating a custom port, where you can choose yes and give your port. I have given the port as 4001

✉️ Step 4: Luring the Victim

Once a port is assigned, a localhost link is created, which can be shared with the victim. It can be observed, the created link is the same page as any login page of Facebook.

🔓 Step 5: Capturing the Credentials

Once the victim clicks the link and logs in thinking it’s real, the attacker sees the username, password, IP address, and user agent in real-time on the terminal.

After capturing the credentials, it will redirect to the actual Facebook page, tricking the user about incorrect logged in.

This data can then be misused to access the victim’s account, perform identity theft, or launch further attacks.

• The fake page looks identical to the real one
• Mobile browsers hide full URLs
• Users trust links from known contacts
• Human psychology favors curiosity and urgency

Even security-conscious individuals can fall for phishing when distracted or in a hurry.