Social engineering manipulates people into revealing access or approving actions, causing compromise; verify requests and enforce least privilege.
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Background for this topic.
Social engineering is the deliberate manipulation of people into disclosing information, bypassing a control, or performing an action for an attacker. It commonly uses phishing, voice or text messages, impersonation, pretexting, and physical access attempts. In a threat model, the attacker targets trust, urgency, authority, or helpfulness rather than exploiting software directly. Successful deception can expose credentials or personal data, authorize fraudulent payments, enable malware delivery, or provide an initial foothold for account or network compromise.
Effective defenses make sensitive requests independently verifiable and limit the damage of a mistake. Use phishing-resistant multi-factor authentication where practical, least-privilege access, and approval or call-back procedures for payments, password resets, and changes to account or banking details. Staff should have a simple way to report suspected messages without penalty; security teams can then investigate related accounts, messages, and login activity, revoke exposed credentials, and contain follow-on access. Awareness training helps people recognize pretexts, but should reinforce these technical and procedural controls rather than rely on vigilance alone.
Weekly headline count for the current query.
Newly documented stealer ClickLock comes for the more trusting Mac user with spot of social engineering
Attackers used social engineering to access third-party business apps and steal patient information
Shift comes amid mounting reports of successful social engineering attacks targeting higher-ups in government
Coming in cold with custom Snow malware A previously unknown threat group using tried-and-tested social engineering tactics - Microsoft Teams chat invitations and helpdesk staff impersonation - is also using custom malware in its data-stealing attacks, according to Google's Threat Intelligence Group.…
Social engineering: 'low-cost, hard to patch, and scales well' North Korean criminals set on stealing Apple users' credentials and cryptocurrency are using a combination of social engineering and a fake Zoom software update to trick people into manually running malware on their own computers, according to Microsoft.…
How to avoid social engineering attacks? Employee training tops the list Be careful what you click on. Miscreants are abusing WhatsApp messages in a multi-stage attack that delivers malicious Microsoft Installer (MSI) packages, allowing criminals to control victims' machines and access all of their data.…
Telegram posts promise up to $1,000 per call as gang refines IT helpdesk ruse Prolific cybercrime crew Scattered Lapsus$ Hunters (SLSH) is reportedly recruiting women in the hope of improving its social engineering success.…
The more you share online, the more you open yourself to social engineering If you've seen the viral AI work pic trend where people are asking ChatGPT to "create a caricature of me and my job based on everything you know about me" and sharing it to social, you might think it's harmless. You'd be wrong.…
Attackers using social engineering to exploit business processes, rather than tunnelling in via tech Exclusive When fraudsters go after people's paychecks, "every employee on earth becomes a target," according to Binary Defense security sleuth John Dwyer.…
Breach-tracking site flags dataset following impersonation-based intrusion Breach-tracking site Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) claims a cyberattack on Betterment affected roughly 1.4 million users – although the investment company has yet to publicly confirm how many customers were affected by January's intrusion.…
Teach a crook to phish… Criminals can more easily pull off social engineering scams and other forms of identity fraud thanks to custom voice-phishing kits being sold on dark web forums and messaging platforms.…
Software maker Kodex said its domain registrar fell for a fraudulent legal order A software platform used by law enforcement agencies and major tech companies to manage subpoenas and data requests went dark this week after attackers socially engineered AWS into freezing its domain.…
ClickFix tricks Microsoft's security team has published an in-depth report into ClickFix, the social engineering attack which tricks users into executing malicious commands in the guise of proving their humanity.…
Underground forums now recruiting English-speaking social engineers English speakers adept at social engineering are a hot commodity in the cybercrime job market.…
New malware, even better social engineering chops The FBI and a host of international cyber and law enforcement agencies on Tuesday warned that Scattered Spider extortionists have changed their tactics and are now breaking into victims' networks using savvier social engineering techniques, searching for organizations' Snowflake database credentials, and deploying a handful of new ransomware variants, most recently DragonForce. …
Keep It Simple, Stupid Interview Scattered Spider and Iranian government-backed cyber units have more in common than a recent uptick in hacking activity, according to Ariel Parnes, a former colonel in the Israeli Defense Forces' cyber unit 8200.…
Plus: Qantas makes contact with 'potential cyber criminal' While the aviation industry has borne the brunt of Scattered Spider's latest round of social engineering attacks, the criminals aim to catch manufacturing and medical tech companies — and even Chipotle Mexican Grill — in tjeor web, as evidenced by hundreds of domains that security researchers say look a lot like phishing websites used by the criminal crews.…
Time ticking for defenders as social engineering pros weave wider web Just a few weeks after warning about Scattered Spider's tactics shifting toward the insurance industry, the same experts now say the aviation industry is now on the ransomware crew's radar.…
Despite arrests, eight-legged menace targeted more victims this year Despite several arrests last year, Scattered Spider's social engineering attacks are continuing into 2025 as the cybercrime collective targets high-profile organizations and adds another phishing kit to its arsenal along with a new version of Spectre RAT malware.…
'The greatest concern is with spear phishing and social engineering' Interview Now that criminals have realized there's no need to train their own LLMs for any nefarious purposes - it's much cheaper and easier to steal credentials and then jailbreak existing ones - the threat of a large-scale supply chain attack using generative AI becomes more real.…