Documented social engineering incidents targeting the defense & aerospace sector, sourced and fact-checked.
A '2011 Recruitment Plan' email with a booby-trapped Excel file breached RSA in 2011. SecurID data was stolen and later used against Lockheed Martin, RSA said.
DocumentedA small Columbus, Ohio public materials manufacturer disclosed in a February 2026 SEC 8-K that it lost $898,325 to an "imposter scam executed in conjunction with bank fraud," recovering only $336,299 by the following quarter despite same-day bank, FBI, and insurer engagement.
DocumentedAPT28's LAMEHUG malware asked an AI model on Hugging Face to write the spy commands it ran on Ukrainian government PCs. How it worked and how to catch it.
DocumentedChinese state-linked hackers used spear-phishing links and an unpatched Internet Explorer zero-day to breach Google, Adobe, and dozens of other US tech and defense firms in a campaign that stole intellectual property, targeted Gmail accounts of human-rights activists, and led Google to publicly confront China and stop censoring its search results.
DocumentedDOJ prosecutions of FIN7 members Fedir Hladyr, Andrii Kolpakov, and Denys Iarmak produced guilty pleas and prison sentences. The records describe the fake Combi Security recruitment front; separately reported FBI attribution links FIN7 to later malicious-USB mailings.
Research/advisoryRussian GRU-linked Forest Blizzard (APT28/Fancy Bear) used OpenAI's GPT-4-family LLM services to research satellite communication protocols and radar.
DocumentedFraudsters impersonating FACC's CEO by email convinced finance staff to wire roughly EUR 50M for a fake acquisition project; EUR 41.9M was lost and both the CEO and CFO were later fired.
DocumentedIn 2025 the US sanctioned North Korean fronts that place fake IT workers abroad, and a US laptop farm operator got 102 months. How the scheme works.
DocumentedTwo New Jersey men ran US "laptop farms" and shell companies that let North Korean IT workers use the stolen identities of real Americans to hold remote jobs at more than 100 US firms, generating over $5 million for the DPRK regime and enabling theft of ITAR-controlled defense data before both were sentenced to federal prison in April 2026.
DocumentedAnthropic says one criminal used Claude Code to breach 17 organisations, price ransoms from their own books and write the notes. Demands hit $500,000+.
DocumentedA fraudster posing as AFGlobal's CEO, backed by a fake KPMG "attorney," pressured the accounting director into wiring $480,000 to a Chinese bank; a follow-up $18M ask blew the scheme.
Social Engineering Examples