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 threat group tracked as APT42 remains on the warpath with various phishing and other social engineering campaigns, as tensions with Israel rise.
Anydesk is its access tool of choice A new extortion gang called Mad Liberator uses social engineering and the remote-access tool Anydesk to steal organizations' data and then demand a ransom payment, according to Sophos X-Ops.…
An ongoing social engineering campaign with alleged links to the Black Basta ransomware group has been linked to "multiple intrusion attempts" with the goal of conducting credential theft and deploying a malware dropper called SystemBC