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 Threat Already Inside Your Network In 2023, Tesla disclosed that two former employees had leaked the personal data of over 75,000 workers to a foreign media outlet. It wasn't a sophisticated nation-state hack. It wasn't a zero-day exploit. It was two people with legitimate
In 2023, MGM Resorts lost roughly $100 million after a threat actor social-engineered their way past the help desk with a single phone call. The attackers didn't exploit a zero-day vulnerability. They didn't write custom malware. They called an employee, pretended to be someone from IT,
The Sticky Note That Cost a Hospital $3 Million A nurse left a sticky note with login credentials on her monitor. A visitor photographed it. Within 48 hours, a threat actor had accessed patient records for over 10,000 individuals. The resulting HIPAA settlement wasn't pretty. I'
In January 2024, security researchers at Checkmarx uncovered a massive man in the middle attack campaign targeting the Python Package Index (PyPI), where threat actors intercepted developer credentials and injected malicious code into software supply chains. The attack went undetected for months. This wasn't some exotic nation-state operation
A consultant nearly lost his entire Google account — not to a sloppy spam email, but to an AI-generated voice call that sounded exactly like Google support, complete with a follow-up email from what appeared to be an official Google domain. That's the new reality. Gmail users warned about
The $55 Million Email That Fooled a CFO In 2024, the automotive parts manufacturer Scoular lost $17.2 million to a business email compromise scheme. But that wasn't even close to the record. Ubiquiti Networks lost $46.7 million. Austrian aerospace firm FACC lost $55.8 million — and
That "Unsubscribe" Click Just Cost Someone Their Entire Network Last year, I worked with a mid-size logistics company that lost access to every file server, customer database, and email system they had. The entry point? A single spam email disguised as a shipping notification. One employee clicked an
A Single Email Cost This Company $121 Million In 2019, a Lithuanian national named Evaldas Rimasauskas pleaded guilty to stealing over $121 million from Google and Facebook. His weapon wasn't malware. It wasn't a zero-day exploit. It was phishing — forged emails impersonating a legitimate hardware vendor,
Last year, a mid-size accounting firm in Ohio lost $1.2 million after a single employee clicked one link in a spoofed Microsoft 365 email. The link looked like a routine password-reset page. It wasn't. Within 90 minutes, a threat actor had harvested credentials, bypassed weak authentication, and
What a Phish Setlist Actually Means for Your Security Team When the band Phish takes the stage, they never play the same setlist twice. Every show is crafted for the audience. Your phishing simulation program should work the same way. A phish setlist — a curated, rotating collection of phishing attack
