#1. Get smashed
If you are after information, nothing will get a person talking more than going to a bar. If a social engineer wants to learn about insider information, he or she may seek out a target who likes to go to bars. The social engineer may follow people home from their work to see which ones go to bars after work, or may look people up on social networking sites to see if there are pictures or any other information that may reveal the names of bars or clubs that they visit. Armed with this information, the social engineer may strike up a conversation with the targeted person at a bar and try to get the person drunk enough to reveal information.
There are several steps a social engineer may take to accomplish this. Once the social engineer learns what bar his target person visits, the social engineer will arrive early to strike up conversation with the bartender. He will tell the bartender that he will be in later and give the bartender a large sum of cash in exchange for making sure that there always drinks ready for him. In addition, he will tell the bartender that no matter what drink he asks for, not to put alcohol in his drink. This way the social engineer stays sober and can focus on this objective while the target person gets drunk.
Later that night, the social engineer will strike up a conversation with the target person, order several rounds of shots and hard liquor on his tab, and attempt to get his target person drunk. Once drunk, the social engineer can bring up the topic of work and proceed to get information that the person would otherwise never share such as how to get into a building, passwords, trade secrets, and more.