Certified social engineering prevention specialist

Certified Social Engineering Prevention Specialist (CSEPS) is a social engineering security-awareness training and professional certification program originally developed by Kevin Mitnick and Alexis Kasperavičius.¹²³

The original CSEPS program was structured as a multi-module corporate security-awareness course designed to teach employees, managers, and IT personnel how social engineers manipulate human behavior to bypass technical security systems.⁴

The curriculum combined case studies, psychological analysis, attack demonstrations, pretexting exercises, and operational security scenarios.⁵

The course materials described social engineering as the exploitation of "the human factor" in information security and argued that traditional technical defenses alone were insufficient to protect organizations from deception-based attacks.⁴

The training program was divided into instructional modules covering topics such as:

• social engineering methodology and threat analysis
• intelligence gathering and reconnaissance
• dumpster diving
• pretexting
• elicitation technique
• telephone-system exploitation and caller-ID spoofing
• psychological influence techniques
• industrial espionage
• identity theft
• organizational vulnerabilities
• security policy development and employee awareness training⁶⁵³

The course also analyzed historical and contemporary case studies involving information theft, corporate espionage, fraudulent wire transfers, and telephone-based impersonation attacks.⁴

Training exercises required participants to analyze how attackers established credibility, manipulated trust, overcame objections, and exploited organizational procedures.⁵

According to The Wall Street Journal, CSEPS was delivered as a two-day "boot camp" course costing approximately US$1,500 per attendee.¹ Clients reportedly included the United States Air Force and the United States Marine Corps.¹

The certification examination included multiple-choice and written-response sections dealing with social-engineering defense scenarios and mitigation strategies.²

In 2003, Mitnick and Kasperavičius partnered with the Florida-based IT training company Intense School Inc. to offer CSEPS classes throughout the United States.¹

In 2020, Mitnick partnered with security-awareness training company KnowBe4, and elements of the original CSEPS material became incorporated into KnowBe4's social-engineering awareness training offerings.⁷⁸