Beyond Blocking: Disrupting the Social Engineering Attack Chain
Summary: A Hacker News piece by Doppel's Bobby Ford describes social engineering as a five-stage attack chain in which adversaries use agentic AI to build impersonation infrastructure, push lures across email, collaboration apps, mobile, social media and paid media, and then carry live conversations with language and voice models. The article cites identity security teams documenting dozens of phishing attacks that never touched the mail gateway, and states that over 40% of modern campaigns span multiple channels in a single sequence.
Why it matters: If more than 40% of campaigns cross channels in one sequence, an organization instrumenting only email is blind for much of the contact phase, and the article notes that customers scammed by lookalike sites blame the brand rather than drawing a line between the real and fake company.
Read the original at The Hacker News ↗
- Topics
- Phishing & Social Engineering
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