Learn how attackers use psychological manipulation to trick people into revealing sensitive information or performing unsafe actions. Topics include pretexting, baiting, tailgating, vishing, and real-world social engineering case studies that expose common human vulnerabilities.
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The CEO Who Wired $47 Million to a Stranger In 2016, FACC, an Austrian aerospace parts manufacturer, lost €42 million (roughly $47 million) after a threat actor impersonated the company's CEO via email and instructed an employee to wire funds for a fake acquisition project. The CEO and
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 298,000 phishing complaints — more than any other cybercrime category. That number has only climbed since. I've investigated breaches at organizations of every size, and the entry point is almost always the same: one employee who
Your Employees Typed the Right URL — And Still Got Hacked In April 2022, researchers at Avast documented a campaign where a threat actor compromised home routers and used DNS hijacking to redirect users from legitimate banking sites to pixel-perfect phishing clones. Victims typed the correct URL into their browser. Their
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor called Scattered Spider social-engineered their way past the help desk with a single phone call. But that attack started the way most do — with a phishing attack that gathered the intelligence needed to make that call convincing.
The Breach That Started With a Single Click In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor social-engineered the company's IT help desk with a ten-minute phone call. The attacker didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability. They didn't brute-force a password.
A Single FakeEmail Cost This Company $37 Million In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — attacks built on fakeemail messages that impersonate trusted senders — generated over $2.9 billion in adjusted losses. That made BEC the costliest cybercrime category for the fourth
A Phone Call That Sounds Exactly Like Google Support — But Isn't In late 2024, a Microsoft solutions consultant named Sam Mitrovic nearly lost his Google account to an AI-generated voice that sounded indistinguishable from a real Google support agent. The caller ID showed a legitimate Google number. The
A Single Email Cost This Company Everything In 2023, MGM Resorts lost an estimated $100 million after a threat actor used a phone-based social engineering attack — a technique closely related to phishing — to gain access to their systems. The attackers didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability or brute-force a
A Google Developer Nearly Lost Everything to a Fake Support Call In early 2025, a well-known Google developer publicly documented how he nearly fell for a sophisticated phishing attack targeting his Gmail account. The caller ID showed a legitimate Google phone number. The voice on the other end sounded professional,
In 2019, a Lithuanian man named Evaldas Rimasauskas pleaded guilty to stealing over $100 million from Google and Facebook — using nothing more than a series of fake email messages. He impersonated a legitimate hardware vendor, sent invoices from spoofed email addresses, and two of the most sophisticated tech companies on
