Social engineering manipulates people into revealing access or approving actions, causing compromise; verify requests and enforce least privilege.
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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.
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.…
A new cybercrime platform called ATHR can harvest credentials via fully automated voice phishing attacks that use both human operators and AI agents for the social engineering phase. [...]
A "novel" social engineering campaign has been observed abusing Obsidian, a cross-platform note-taking application, as an initial access vector to distribute a previously undocumented Windows remote access trojan called PHANTOMPULSE in attacks targeting individuals in the financial and cryptocurrency sectors
The social engineering campaign spiked last month and has targeted dozens of organizations since May 2025, according to ReliaQuest. The post Black Basta’s playbook lives on as former affiliates launch fast-scale intrusion campaign appeared first on CyberScoop.
The North Korean hacking group tracked as APT37 (aka ScarCruft) has been attributed to a fresh multi-stage, social engineering campaign in which threat actors approached targets on Facebook and added them as friends on the social media platform, turning the trust-building exercise into a delivery channel for a remote access trojan called RokRAT