Why Do Cyber Attackers Commonly Use Social Engineering Attacks: A Look at Social Networking
Introduction to Social Engineering
Social engineering is a non-technical strategy that cyber attackers commonly use to manipulate people into breaking security protocols through human interaction. Rather than relying on hacking tools or exploiting software vulnerabilities, social engineering attacks focus on exploiting human behavior to compromise security. Attackers may trick individuals into revealing sensitive information, such as login credentials or financial details, or persuade them to download malicious software that can infect a computer system. Because these engineering attacks target the human element, they often bypass technical defenses like firewalls and antivirus programs. Cyber attackers commonly use social engineering tactics because they require minimal resources and can be highly effective, especially when targeting unsuspecting users. The consequences of these attacks can be severe, leading to identity theft, financial loss, and significant damage to an organization’s reputation. As social engineering attacks continue to evolve, understanding how attackers exploit human behavior is essential for protecting sensitive information and maintaining strong security measures.
Your Users' Human Behavior Is the #1 Target
Social engineering is a collection of techniques used to manipulate people into performing actions or divulging confidential information. In many instances, unauthorized individuals use social engineering to trick your users into clicking links in email messages, visiting fake websites, downloading and installing malicious software, and handing over sensitive or personally identifiable information.
What makes social engineering so effective is that it bypasses your technical defenses entirely. Firewalls, intrusion detection systems, and antivirus software are all designed to stop digital threats. But when an attacker convinces an employee to willingly hand over a password or approve a fraudulent request, those technical controls become irrelevant. According to the 2025 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report, the human element (including social engineering, stolen credentials, and user errors) plays a role in roughly 60% of all data breaches. Human error is often considered the weakest link in security systems, and attackers specifically exploit this vulnerability through social engineering tactics.
The threat landscape has changed dramatically in recent years. AI-powered tools now allow attackers to craft highly personalized phishing messages, clone executive voices for fraudulent phone calls, and even generate realistic deepfake video calls. These are not futuristic scenarios. They are happening right now, and businesses of all sizes are being targeted.
Principles of Influence
Understanding the principles of influence is key to recognizing how social engineering attacks succeed. Cyber attackers often rely on psychological manipulation, using well-established techniques to persuade individuals to divulge sensitive information or perform actions that compromise security. Robert Cialdini’s six principles of influence—reciprocity, commitment and consistency, social proof, liking, authority, and scarcity—are frequently leveraged in social engineering. For example, an attacker might use social proof by creating a fake website that appears to be endorsed by trusted colleagues, making the victim more likely to trust it. Authority is another powerful tool, with attackers impersonating executives or IT staff to pressure employees into compliance. Scarcity and urgency can be used to rush decisions, while reciprocity might involve offering something in return for information. By understanding these principles, individuals and organizations can better identify social engineering attacks and avoid falling victim to tactics designed to compromise security and steal sensitive information.
How Social Engineering Attacks Work Today
At its core, every social engineering attack has three components: a medium to reach the victim (email, phone, text, social media), a fabricated story designed to create urgency or trust, and a request for action (click a link, transfer money, share credentials). What has changed is how convincing each of those components has become.
The most common forms of social engineering targeting businesses today include:
Phishing and Spear Phishing. Phishing remains the most prevalent social engineering technique. Attackers send emails that impersonate trusted brands or colleagues, enticing recipients to click malicious links or open infected attachments. These phishing emails often trick users into downloading malicious code or visiting malicious websites designed to steal sensitive information. The Anti-Phishing Working Group recorded over one million phishing attacks in Q1 2025, with volumes continuing to climb. Spear phishing attacks take this further by targeting specific individuals with personalized messages crafted from information gathered on social media, company websites, and data breaches. The most impersonated brands include Microsoft, DocuSign, Adobe, PayPal, and LinkedIn.
Business Email Compromise (BEC). BEC attacks involve impersonating a trusted person, such as a CEO, CFO, or supplier, to fool employees into sending money or sensitive information to fraudulent accounts. Attackers often use spoof email addresses to make their messages appear legitimate. These attacks do not rely on malware at all. Instead, they use impersonation and a believable story. Pretexting incidents (creating a fabricated scenario to manipulate the target) have almost doubled in recent years and now account for over 50% of all social engineering incidents. The FBI received over 21,000 BEC complaints in 2024, with losses totaling $2.77 billion.
Voice Phishing (Vishing) and SMS Phishing (Smishing). As email filters have improved, attackers have pivoted to other channels. Voice phishing has seen explosive growth, with attackers using phone calls to impersonate IT support, bank representatives, or executives. SMS phishing uses text messages with malicious links. In one notable 2025 breach, Harvard University confirmed that an attacker used phone-based social engineering to obtain credentials and access donor records containing email addresses, phone numbers, and home addresses. Attackers may also trick victims into downloading malicious software onto the victim's computer.
AI-Powered Deepfake Attacks. This is perhaps the most alarming development in social engineering. Attackers can now use AI to clone an executive’s voice from as little as three seconds of audio, achieving an 85% voice match. They can generate realistic deepfake video calls that impersonate CEOs and CFOs in real-time. In one high-profile case, an engineering firm lost $25.6 million after an employee was deceived by a deepfake video call impersonating the company’s CFO. A 2025 Gartner survey found that 62% of organizations reported experiencing a deepfake attack in the past 12 months, yet 80% of companies have no established protocols for handling deepfake-based attacks.
MFA Prompt Bombing. Even multi-factor authentication is being targeted. Attackers bombard users with repeated MFA login requests, hoping the user will eventually approve one just to make it stop. Prompt bombing attacks represented 14% of social engineering incidents in 2024 and succeeded in more than 20% of social attacks within the public sector in 2025.
Help Desk and IT Support Manipulation. Attackers are increasingly calling internal help desks, posing as employees, and requesting password resets or access changes. In some cases, threat actors have moved from initial access to domain administrator privileges in under 40 minutes using only built-in tools and social pretexts, without deploying any malware.
Initial social engineering attacks can lead to further attacks, escalating the threat to organizations.
The Role of AI in Modern Social Engineering
Artificial intelligence has fundamentally changed the social engineering threat landscape. Attackers are using generative AI to write flawless phishing emails in multiple languages, eliminating the grammar mistakes and awkward phrasing that used to be telltale signs of a scam. Microsoft's Digital Defense Report 2025 found that adversaries are increasingly using AI to scale phishing and influence campaigns. According to ENISA's 2025 Threat Landscape report, AI-supported phishing represented more than 80% of observed social engineering activity worldwide by early 2025.
The old advice to "look for typos and bad grammar" is no longer a reliable defense. AI-generated messages are polished, contextually appropriate, and often indistinguishable from legitimate communications. Attackers can also use AI to automate reconnaissance, mining social media profiles, company websites, and leaked databases to build detailed profiles of their targets before launching highly personalized attacks.
Social Networking Risks for Business
In a business environment, social networks can be valuable tools for engaging with customers, staff, suppliers, and investors. Sales and marketing teams use platforms like LinkedIn, Facebook, and X (formerly Twitter) to build relationships and generate leads. However, these same platforms provide attackers with a wealth of information they can use to craft convincing social engineering campaigns.
Job postings, org charts, employee profiles, and even photos of office badges give attackers the details they need to impersonate colleagues or executives convincingly. Attackers may use this information to obtain personal details and target individuals within the organization. Since communication on social platforms is performed electronically, hackers can pose as imposters to entice users to perform actions, disclose trade secrets, or click on links to sites loaded with malware.
Social network policies and procedures should include settings and guidelines that protect users and the organization from these threats:
• Profile Visibility - Change default settings to restrict access to user profiles. Limit visibility to approved connections only.
• Contact Lists - Configure settings to ensure that connections and contact lists are not publicly visible on profile pages.
• Search Indexing - Disable public search indexing where possible. This helps prevent search engines from surfacing employee profiles and company information.
• Photos and Media - Configure privacy settings to restrict access to photos and shared media. Be especially careful about images that show office layouts, employee badges, or internal systems.
• Content Monitoring - Develop procedures to monitor staff postings and ensure that organization-sensitive information is not inadvertently disclosed on social networking sites.
• Corporate Network Protection - Protect the corporate network by implementing access controls, cybersecurity technologies, and employee training to prevent breaches resulting from social engineering attacks.
• Job Posting Hygiene - Be mindful of what organizational details appear in job listings. Detailed org charts, reporting structures, and internal tool names give attackers valuable reconnaissance data.
The Real Cost to Business: Loss of Sensitive Information
The financial impact of social engineering is staggering. The United States lost $16.6 billion to social engineering attacks in 2024, a 33% increase from the previous year. The global average cost of a data breach reached $4.88 million, with phishing-initiated breaches averaging $4.91 million. Ransomware and extortion, which frequently begin with a social engineering entry point, drove over half of cyberattacks globally in 2025. These more complex threats often happen alongside initial social engineering attacks, escalating into complex threats that require advanced defensive measures.
Social engineering attacks inflict psychological distress on victims, causing emotional and mental suffering that can persist long after the incident. The psychological distress experienced by individuals and organizations can be as damaging as financial or reputational harm. Social engineering attacks extend beyond immediate losses, undermining trust, damaging long-term well-being, and facilitating additional threats.
Beyond direct financial losses, organizations face reputational damage, regulatory penalties, operational disruption, and the cost of incident response and recovery. For small and mid-sized businesses, these impacts can be particularly devastating. SMBs often have fewer security controls, more informal verification processes, and less frequent employee training, making them attractive targets.
Identifying Social Engineering Attacks
Identifying social engineering attacks requires both technical awareness and an understanding of human psychology. Cyber attackers commonly use social engineering tactics that exploit human emotions such as fear, urgency, or curiosity to gain access to sensitive information. Common social engineering attacks include phishing scams, spear phishing, and business email compromise, where attackers use psychological manipulation to trick victims into revealing confidential data or transferring money. Real world examples include emails that appear to be from trusted sources but contain a malicious link, or phone calls from someone impersonating IT support requesting login credentials. To identify social engineering attacks, be wary of unsolicited messages that create a sense of urgency or request sensitive information. Always verify the identity of anyone asking for confidential details, especially if the request comes through digital communications. By staying alert to these tactics and understanding how attackers commonly use social engineering, individuals and organizations can reduce the risk of a successful social engineering attack and better protect their sensitive data.
How to Protect Your Organization
Users have a responsibility to help protect sensitive and proprietary information. With sufficient security education and awareness training, they become your front line of defense. Even the most advanced security systems can be compromised through social engineering techniques. But in 2026, training alone is not enough. Organizations need a layered approach that combines people, process, and technology:
• Security Awareness Training - Provide regular, role-based security education that covers current threats including AI-generated phishing, deepfakes, vishing, BEC, and common social engineering scams. Include realistic phishing simulations to test and reinforce employee awareness. Research shows that security awareness training programs can reduce the risk of successful phishing attacks by 86% after one year of consistent training.
• Verification Procedures - Establish clear out-of-band verification protocols for any requests involving financial transactions, credential changes, or sensitive data. If someone calls claiming to be the CEO and requests an urgent wire transfer, employees should have a defined process to verify that request through a separate, trusted communication channel. This is especially important in the age of voice cloning and deepfakes.
• Zero Trust Security - Adopt a Zero Trust approach that requires continuous verification of every user, device, and access request. Zero Trust operates on three principles: verify explicitly, use least-privilege access, and assume breach. This means no user or device is automatically trusted, even if they are inside your network. Network segmentation, strong identity management, and conditional access policies help contain the damage if an attacker does gain initial access through social engineering. Zero Trust helps defend against cyber attacks that begin with social engineering techniques.
• Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) - Implement phishing-resistant MFA across all systems. While standard MFA is better than passwords alone, organizations should consider FIDO2-compliant hardware security keys or passkeys, which are resistant to prompt bombing and credential theft attacks.
• Email and Communication Filtering - Deploy advanced email filtering solutions that use AI-based detection to identify phishing attempts, spoofed sender addresses, and malicious attachments, including filtering for malicious code embedded in attachments or links. Extend these protections to messaging platforms and collaboration tools.
• Endpoint Protection - Maintain updated anti-malware software on all endpoints. Use endpoint detection and response (EDR) tools that can identify suspicious behavior patterns, not just known malware signatures.
• Help Desk Security Protocols - Strengthen identity verification procedures for password resets and access changes requested through IT support channels. Require multiple verification steps before processing any privileged access requests.
• Incident Response Planning - Develop and regularly test an incident response plan that specifically addresses social engineering scenarios. Employees should know exactly how to report suspicious communications, and the response team should have clear procedures for containment and investigation.
• Formal Security Policies - Document and enforce security policies that establish a top-down approach to managing security risks. Policies should cover acceptable use, data handling, social media, incident reporting, and remote work security requirements, and address threats such as malicious code and social engineering techniques.
Stay Ahead of the Threat
Social engineering is not going away. If anything, it is becoming more sophisticated, more personalized, and harder to detect. The organizations that fare best are the ones that treat security as an ongoing practice rather than a one-time project. Regular training, strong verification procedures, and a Zero Trust mindset will go a long way toward protecting your people and your data.
IT security audits help ensure your organization's assets have the proper security controls in place. Social engineering security assessments help protect your sensitive data and intellectual property by evaluating and testing the effectiveness of your employee security education and awareness training. Formal and documented policies ensure a top-down approach to managing security risks.