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.
Void Dokkaebi Campaigns Using Russia for Cryptocurrency TheftNorth Korean hackers look north toward Russia for the internet infrastructure behind the many online scams that Pyongyang has built to funnel stolen cash into the rouge nation. Void Dokkaebi hackers participate in the North Korean scam of social engineering IT job seekers.
Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report highlighted dire — but not new — trends in the education sector. Without more help, faculty and staff continue to fall for social engineering campaigns and make simple security errors.
The Iran-nexus threat actor known as UNC2428 has been observed delivering a backdoor known as MURKYTOUR as part of a job-themed social engineering campaign aimed at Israel in October 2024
Multiple suspected Russia-linked threat actors are "aggressively" targeting individuals and organizations with ties to Ukraine and human rights with an aim to gain unauthorized access to Microsoft 365 accounts since early March 2025
A hacking group dubbed 'Elusive Comet' targets cryptocurrency users in social engineering attacks that exploit Zoom's remote control feature to trick users into granting them access to their machines. [...]
Attack Combines Social Engineering and Card Emulation to Execute Real-Time TheftHackers are using Chinese-speaking Android malware-as-a-service SuperCard X to carry out near-field communication relay attacks, siphoning payment card data and executing live point of sale and ATM transactions. Victims receive spoofed SMS or WhatsApp alerts purporting to originate from their bank.
The threat actor uses sophisticated social engineering techniques to infect a victim's device, either with an infostealer or remote access Trojan (RAT).
ClickFix attacks are being increasingly adopted by threat actors of all levels, with researchers now seeing multiple advanced persistent threat (APT) groups from North Korea, Iran, and Russia utilizing the tactic to breach networks. [...]