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.
ClickFix abuses clipboards. FileFix hijacks File Explorer. Both social engineering attacks start in the browser—and end in malware. See how Keep Aware stops these stealthy attacks before they break out of the browser in a run down of a real attack. [...]
The North Korea-linked threat actor known as UNC4899 has been attributed to attacks targeting two different organizations by approaching their employees via LinkedIn and Telegram
Fraudsters are flooding Discord and other social media platforms with ads for hundreds of polished online gaming and wagering websites that lure people with free credits and eventually abscond with any cryptocurrency funds deposited by players. Here's a closer look at the social engineering tactics and remarkable traits of this sprawling network of more than 1,200 scam sites.
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. …
Until recently, the cyber attacker methodology behind the biggest breaches of the last decade or so has been pretty consistent: Compromise an endpoint via software exploit, or social engineering a user to run malware on their device; Find ways to move laterally inside the network and compromise privileged identities; Repeat as needed until you can execute your desired attack — usually
Attackers Stole US Customer Data Using Social EngineeringA malicious actor breached a customer relationship management platform used by Allianz Life Insurance of North America on July 16 and stole personally identifiable information of most of its 1.4 million U.S. customers, financial professionals and some employees, the company said.