Fortify Your Cyber Fortress: Conquer the 2025 NDE Practice Exam! 🚀🔐

The correct choice highlights social engineering, a broad term encompassing various techniques used to manipulate individuals into divulging confidential information. Social engineering relies heavily on psychological manipulation rather than technical hacking methods.

Phishing is indeed a specific type of social engineering, where attackers impersonate trustworthy entities in electronic communication to trick people into revealing sensitive information. While phishing is directly related to the extraction of personal information, it falls under the wider category of social engineering.

Hacking involves exploiting technical vulnerabilities in computer systems or networks, which is different from the psychological methods used in social engineering. Data mining, on the other hand, refers to the process of analyzing large sets of data to discover patterns and extract useful information, typically done with legal consent and often in business contexts.

Understanding social engineering as a whole is crucial in network defense, as it encompasses various tactics, including phishing, aimed at obtaining personal data through deception.