What type of attack involves tricking users into providing their confidential information?

The type of attack that involves tricking users into providing their confidential information is social engineering. This attack exploits human psychology rather than technical vulnerabilities, manipulating individuals into revealing sensitive data such as passwords, credit card numbers, or personal identification information.

Social engineering can take various forms, including phishing emails, where attackers impersonate trustworthy entities to deceive recipients into providing sensitive information, or pretexting, where attackers create a fabricated scenario to convince individuals to share information. The effectiveness of social engineering lies in the attackers' ability to build trust and exploit social interactions, making it a prevalent threat in the cybersecurity landscape.

In contrast, denial of service attacks focus on disrupting service availability, SQL injection targets vulnerabilities in databases by injecting malicious code, and man-in-the-middle attacks involve intercepting communication between two parties to access or alter the transmitted data. Each of these is rooted in different technical methods or network vulnerabilities rather than directly manipulating users for information.