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 FakeEmail Problem Is Bigger Than You Think In March 2022, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — the category that covers most fakeemail schemes — accounted for $2.4 billion in adjusted losses in 2021 alone. That made it the single most financially damaging
When Trusted Software Becomes Your Biggest Threat In March 2022, researchers confirmed that threat actors had compromised the update mechanism for Asus software, ultimately pushing malware to nearly a million machines. The attackers hadn't built anything from scratch. They had removed legitimate code from a trusted update pipeline
91% of Cyberattacks Start With a Single Spam Email That number comes from research that's been validated year after year. Verizon's 2022 Data Breach Investigations Report found that 82% of breaches involved a human element — and the overwhelming majority of those started in someone's
In March 2022, the FBI warned that threat actors were spoofing caller IDs of financial institutions and government agencies to steal millions from unsuspecting victims. The Bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received over 18,000 complaints related to spoofing in 2021 alone, with adjusted losses exceeding $82
In March 2022, a single employee at Okta clicked a link in what appeared to be a routine IT notification. That one click gave the Lapsus$ threat actor group access to internal systems, ultimately affecting roughly 2.5% of Okta's customer base — hundreds of organizations. The attack didn&
In March 2022, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that Business Email Compromise — a scheme built almost entirely on spoofing — cost victims over $2.4 billion in 2021 alone. That made it the single most financially devastating category of cybercrime they tracked. Not ransomware. Not cryptojacking. Spoofing-based
A Single Phishing Email Led to a $100 Million Heist Between 2013 and 2015, a Lithuanian man orchestrated one of the most audacious cases of group online svindel ever documented. Evaldas Rimasauskas and his associates impersonated a legitimate Asian hardware manufacturer and tricked both Google and Facebook into wiring over
A Perfectly Forged Invoice That Almost Worked Last month, a controller at a mid-sized logistics company forwarded me an email she'd almost clicked. It looked like a DocuSign envelope notification for a PayPal invoice — complete with the yellow DocuSign button, a legitimate-looking PayPal logo, and a $3,200
In March 2022, threat actor group Lapsus$ breached Okta by compromising a single support engineer's laptop — an attack chain that started with social engineering and credential theft. One employee. One set of stolen credentials. And suddenly, a company trusted by thousands of organizations to manage authentication was scrambling
In August 2022, Twilio disclosed that a sophisticated phishing campaign had compromised employee credentials and exposed data tied to over 130 organizations — including the encrypted messaging giant Signal. A month earlier, a massive phishing operation dubbed "0ktapus" by researchers at Group-IB had already hit over 130 companies. If
