Social Engineering Examples is a free, public library of real social engineering incidents: phishing, vishing, smishing, quishing, deepfakes, pretexting, physical break-ins, and AI-driven attacks. It’s here so security teams, journalists, and researchers can see how real attacks actually played out, not how a vendor brochure describes them.
The Social Engineering Examples team looks after the library, and Diopter AI publishes it. We kept seeing the same few tricks turn up in incident after incident. We wanted one place to point people to, with the sources attached, instead of a trail of scattered blog posts and news stories.
This is editorial content, not a sales funnel. There are no gated case studies, no lead forms, and no product pitch hidden in the write-ups. If a case really is relevant to detection tools, we say so plainly, and that’s the only place it comes up.
AI tools helped research, draft, and review this library. Going back over the early work, we found mistakes and claims the sources didn’t support. Now every proposed fix is checked against saved source evidence, open questions get logged, and there’s a review history. A second AI review is a safety net. It isn’t a guarantee, and it doesn’t mean a person read every citation.
The methodology page walks through the whole process, what the checks turned up, and what they miss. Where the library is thin or lopsided, the limitations page says so.
Each case page covers one real, named incident. You’ll see what happened, who it hit, the pretext or lure the attacker used, and the control that would’ve stopped it. Cases are grouped into attack families so you can browse by type, and every claim has a source. Our methodology explains how each case is checked and labeled.
Teaching or researching with this material? The for educators page covers licensing, how to cite it, and what the library can and can’t support.
Found a mistake, a dead source link, or a case that belongs in a different category? Email hello@diopter.ai and we’ll fix it. The same goes for any organization named in a case. If we’ve got something wrong about your incident, tell us, and we’ll either correct it or explain how we read the sources.
We try to reply within five working days, and we’ll tell you what changed.
Social Engineering Examples