Social Engineering | Breaking Cybersecurity News | The Hacker News

When it comes to email security software, the cybersecurity industry has become very good at one thing: scoring the message that's already in the inbox. We've gone from blocklists to signature matching to behavioral ML, and each generation of email security innovation was a genuine improvement over the last.  But the losses keep climbing anyway. The median time it takes someone to click a phishing link is just 21 seconds after opening the email, and another 28 seconds to hand over credentials or payment data. That's under a minute start to finish. That number hasn't moved much in years despite everything we've thrown at the problem. It's time for a different approach. But first, we need to understand modern challenges. We're filtering messages, but attackers are running campaigns By the time a phishing email actually lands in someone's inbox, the attacker has usually finished the hard part. They've registered a lookalike domain and gotten it a vali...

For a long time, the cybersecurity industry has framed social engineering as a psychological problem. We treat it as a battle of wits between a charismatic con artist and an unsuspecting employee. The prevailing wisdom says that if we just train our people to better identify scams or tear down malicious infrastructure slightly faster, we can stay ahead of scammers. But looking at the threat landscape from a purely threat-intelligence perspective tells us something entirely different: Modern social engineering is more than a psychological game. It's a highly optimized, industrialized deception economy. Attackers run campaigns like hyper-efficient businesses. They have Customer Acquisition Costs, operational budgets, and strict Return on Investment (ROI) targets. This is the part the industry doesn't like to sit with: If we want to truly break the social engineering attack chain , we have to stop focusing exclusively on building higher walls or executing reactive takedowns...

The most important cybersecurity impact of artificial intelligence is not that attackers can write better phishing emails or automate parts of their workflow. It is that AI is changing the speed, scale, and decision-making dynamics of cyberattacks.  That creates a problem many organizations have not yet fully confronted: most cyber governance and incident response models were designed for human-speed attacks.  For years, security teams operated under a familiar sequence. Detect suspicious activity. Investigate. Validate the threat. Escalate to leadership. Decide on containment. Communicate with stakeholders. That model still has value, but it assumes defenders have enough time to build confidence before taking material action.  AI-enabled attacks challenge that assumption.  Adversaries can now use AI to accelerate reconnaissance, generate highly personalized social engineering, modify malware, test payloads, summarize stolen data, identify vulnerabilities, a...

For years, our industry has treated "blocking" as the gold standard. If the email didn't land, if the malware didn't execute, if the alert fired in the SIEM, we called it a win. That mindset made sense in a world where most attacks came through a handful of familiar doors. But AI has changed the game. We're not dealing with hobbyists sending out clumsy phishing attacks anymore. Modern adversaries are running multi‑channel, AI‑assisted businesses at machine speed. And if all you're doing is blocking at the edge, you're not really defending. You're just delaying. Generative AI has made it trivial to spin up highly personalized, multi‑step social engineering campaigns that operate simultaneously across email, collaboration apps, mobile, social media, and paid media. The result is a social engineering attack chain : a sequence of stages designed to manufacture trust, erode judgment, and bypass brittle controls. You don't beat that by tuning another filter. You have to disrupt the at...

Microsoft Teams' cross-tenant collaboration feature, which allows external accounts to message employees directly, is enabled by default in most enterprise deployments . Most organizations have never audited or restricted it. That default setting has become one of the more reliable social engineering entry points security teams are managing today. The base attack is straightforward. An attacker creates an external Teams account, identifies a target through LinkedIn or a company directory, and sends a message posing as IT helpdesk staff. The message cites an urgent account issue (an MFA problem, a security alert, a failed login) and asks the employee to open Quick Assist, a built-in Microsoft remote assistance tool, and approve a session. What has changed recently is the layer added on top of that initial contact: an AI-generated voice that sounds like someone the target already knows. How the Base Attack Chain Unfolds Once Quick Assist access is established, the attack fol...

As anticipation builds for the FIFA World Cup 2026, cybercriminals are rapidly scaling fraud operations designed to exploit global fan excitement, urgency, and trust in tournament-related content. CTM360 researchers identified more than 7,000 FIFA World Cup 2026-themed domains, including over 4,500 newly registered domains observed within the last five months alone . More than 1,000 malicious or fraudulent websites have already been activated, alongside over 1,000 social media impersonation accounts operating across major platforms. The activity highlights how threat actors increasingly treat major global sporting events as large-scale monetization opportunities, combining fake ticket sales, fraudulent streaming platforms, betting scams, malware delivery, and social engineering into coordinated fraud ecosystems. Unlike isolated phishing attempts, these campaigns operate through repeatable fraud lifecycles that mirror organized cybercrime operations. CTM360's Fraud Navigator ...

BEC accounted for over $3 billion in reported losses last year alone. Most organizations don't realize they're exposed until it's too late. Here's how to tell if your defenses have gaps. Business email compromise doesn't announce itself. There's no ransomware splash screen, no locked files, no dramatic system outage. Instead, a finance team member processes what looks like a routine vendor payment update. A controller wires funds based on what appears to be a CFO's direct request. By the time anyone notices, the money is gone. The FBI IC3's 2024 Internet Crime Report documented $55 billion in cumulative BEC losses over the past decade, with $3 billion in 2024 alone — making it the most financially destructive enterprise-targeted cyber threat in the country. The challenge with BEC is that it exploits trust, not technology. These attacks carry no malicious payload for a gateway to catch — just carefully crafted messages designed to manipulate human judgment. That makes traditional de...

Government impersonation scams have evolved into a large, highly coordinated fraud ecosystem targeting citizens across the globe. CTM360 's latest threat intelligence research analyzes a widespread campaign, referred to as GovTrap, that demonstrates how attackers systematically exploit public trust in government institutions through thousands of fraudulent digital platforms. Unlike traditional phishing attacks that rely on simple deceptions, GovTrap campaigns replicate entire government service environments. These fraudulent platforms mimic official portals with high accuracy, including branding, language, workflows, and service structures. From tax portals and licensing systems to fine payment services, each fake site is designed to appear legitimate while functioning as part of a broader, scalable fraud operation. Read the full report here:  https://www.ctm360.com/reports/government-impersonation-phishing-govtrap-scams Scale and Targeting Patterns CTM360 identified mo...

For security leaders, the inbox remains the front door for attackers. Here's why the smartest teams are adding adaptive, AI-driven protection to their cloud email security, not replacing them. Email is still the number-one attack vector for enterprises, and it is not even close. The FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Center reported that business email compromise alone generated $3 billion in losses in 2024 , with AI-enabled attacks accelerating the trend ( FBI IC3 Report ). The attacks that succeed today don't carry obvious malicious payloads. They rely on trust, tone, and timing; a spoofed vendor sending a "routine" invoice update, or a convincing impersonation of a CEO with an urgent request. No malware. No suspicious links. Just words, carefully chosen. Microsoft 365 is the backbone of productivity for most organizations, and Microsoft Defender and Exchange Online Protection do solid work catching known spam, malware, and co...