Documented social engineering incidents targeting the defense & aerospace sector, sourced and fact-checked.
A single spear-phishing email titled "2011 Recruitment Plan," with a booby-trapped Excel attachment.
ConfirmedA small Columbus, Ohio manufacturer disclosed in a February 2026 SEC 8-K that it lost $898,325 to an imposter scam executed with bank fraud.
ConfirmedGoogle's GTIG and Ukraine's CERT-UA documented PROMPTSTEAL (aka LAMEHUG).
ConfirmedChinese state-linked hackers used spear-phishing links and an unpatched Internet Explorer zero-day to breach Google, Adobe.
ConfirmedFIN7 (Carbanak) mailed USPS packages disguised as Best Buy gift-card rewards containing BadUSB hardware implants to HR, IT.
ConfirmedDOJ unsealed indictments and won guilty pleas, prison terms, and multimillion-dollar restitution against FIN7 (Carbanak Group) members Fedir Hladyr.
ConfirmedRussian GRU-linked Forest Blizzard (APT28/Fancy Bear) used OpenAI's GPT-4-family LLM services to research satellite communication protocols and radar.
ConfirmedFraudsters impersonating FACC's CEO by email convinced finance staff to wire roughly EUR 50M for a fake acquisition project.
ConfirmedTwo New Jersey men ran US "laptop farms" and shell companies that let North Korean IT workers pose as American remote employees at 100+ US firms.
ConfirmedTreasury/OFAC sanctioned North Korean Ministry of National Defense and Munitions Industry Department front companies in Laos, China.
ConfirmedA single cybercriminal used Anthropic's Claude Code as an autonomous operator to breach ~17 organizations and generate psychologically targeted.
ConfirmedA fraudster posing as AFGlobal's CEO, backed by a fake KPMG "attorney," pressured the accounting director into wiring $480,000 to a Chinese bank.
Social Engineering Examples