In person, uninvited¶

Physical social engineering is the discipline of being somewhere you shouldn’t, with equipment you shouldn’t have, doing things nobody authorised. It works because humans are polite, distracted, and trained by years of office life to assume that if someone is already inside the building they probably belong there. A confident stride and a lanyard carry more weight than a signed access request ever did.

The techniques here range from walking through doors behind other people to cloning the credential that would have opened those doors anyway. All of them rely on the same underlying truth: security theatre is designed to deter, not to stop. When someone actually tries, the gaps become obvious very quickly.