Excerpt from Black Hat Rust Translation Details Chapter 9 on Phishing via WebAssembly and Social Engineering
A new excerpt from the Russian translation of the book Black Hat Rust has appeared on Habr, presenting a polished section of Chapter 9 dedicated to phishing combined with WebAssembly.
The chapter opens by noting that when technical vulnerabilities cannot be found due to insufficient skills, team support, or time, attackers turn to people instead. It states that phishing attacks are particularly inexpensive and that humans are frequently more vulnerable than infrastructure.
The text then moves into social engineering, defined as the practice of persuading targets to disclose information, perform actions, or grant unauthorized access. It references Aristotle’s work Rhetoric and its three core elements of persuasion: Ethos (credibility), Pathos (emotion), and Logos (reason).
Under Ethos, the author stresses the need to construct a believable persona that would legitimately make the desired request, such as a system administrator asking for credential-reset links. Pathos is achieved through plausible storytelling that introduces a disruptive element only the target can resolve. Logos requires explaining why the request is important and why the target should act immediately.
The translator explicitly leaves code examples untouched, arguing that seven-year-old samples serve as a practical reminder to verify exploits rather than trust them at face value, especially given the prevalence of non-functional code on Exploit-DB.
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