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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Last year, a finance director at a mid-size logistics company wired $1.2 million to a threat actor who sent a single phishing email impersonating the CEO. The email contained no malware, no suspicious attachments, and no misspelled words. It simply asked for an urgent wire transfer, referenced a real
A Single Phishing Email Cost This Company $100 Million In 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that phishing — often misspelled as "phising" — remained the most reported cybercrime category, with hundreds of thousands of complaints filed in a single year. But the raw numbers don&
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise — a sophisticated form of fake mail — caused adjusted losses exceeding $2.9 billion. That single category of email fraud outpaced every other cybercrime type in financial damage. And those are just the cases that got
The FBI Warning on Vishing and Smishing You Can't Afford to Ignore In early 2024, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) flagged a sharp escalation in vishing and smishing campaigns targeting businesses and individuals across the United States. The 2023 IC3 Annual Report documented over
The $4.88 Million Email That Looked Completely Normal In 2023, a finance employee at a midsize manufacturing firm received an email from what appeared to be the CEO. It referenced a real acquisition the company was working on. It used the CEO's actual email signature. The employee
Your Inbox Is a Buffet — and Attackers Are Feeding In March 2024, MGM Resorts was still tallying the damage from a social engineering attack that started with a single phone call to their help desk. The cost? Over $100 million in losses. The attacker didn't exploit a zero-day
In 2023, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center received over 298,000 complaints about phishing — making it the most reported cybercrime for the fifth consecutive year. That number only accounts for what gets reported. The actual volume is staggering. So what is a phishing attack, and why does
A Single Fake Email Cost This Company $37 Million In 2024, Japanese pharmaceutical giant Nikkei disclosed that a single employee wired approximately $29 million to a fraudulent account after receiving what appeared to be a legitimate email from a senior executive. They aren't alone. The FBI's
A Single FakeEmail Cost One Company $37 Million In 2024, Orion SA, a Luxembourg-based steel trading company, disclosed it lost approximately $60 million after an employee was tricked by a business email compromise scheme using fraudulent email communications. That same year, the FBI's IC3 received over 21,000
A Single PayPal Email Cost One Business Owner $68,000 I got the call on a Tuesday morning. A small business owner in Ohio had received what looked like a routine PayPal dispute notification. She clicked the link, entered her credentials, and within four hours, a threat actor had drained
