The Art of Deception is organized in 4 parts. Before the first part begins an introduction and a little biography are given for all those who don't know Kevin Mitnick at this point. The first part then gives an introduction to Mitnick's background and information on incidents such as the Rifkin's 10$ million bank theft and explains the basic ideas behind social engineering.


The second and third part make up the most of the book and includes several subchapters which covers different storys on social engineering, such as gaining valuable information by simply asking or by pretending to be someone else. Often the first information gained will be used to extend the knowledge by using it to exploit further persons and to gain access to resources which would be normally prohibited for the average person. The fictional stories in those chapters are quite basic and should be easy to understand. Most tactics used were to pretend to be someone who would normally have legal access to the resources of interest but for some reason not at the moment or by pretending to be under enormous time pressure.