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.
The North Korea-backed Lazarus Group has been observed targeting job seekers with malware capable of executing on Apple Macs with Intel and M1 chipsets
Two different kinds of fraud, says judge while throwing out lawsuit against insurer A Minnesota computer store suing its crime insurance provider has had its case dismissed, with the courts saying it was a clear instance of social engineering, a crime for which the insurer was only liable to cover a fraction of total losses.…
The Microsoft Threat Intelligence Center (MSTIC) has disrupted a hacking and social engineering operation linked to a Russian threat actor tracked as SEABORGIUM that targets propland organizations in NATO countries. [...]