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.
ConfirmedRussian GRU-linked Forest Blizzard (APT28/Fancy Bear) used OpenAI's GPT-4-family LLM services to research satellite communication protocols and radar.
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.
ConfirmedFraudsters impersonating FACC's CEO by email convinced finance staff to wire roughly EUR 50M for a fake acquisition project.
ConfirmedTreasury/OFAC sanctioned North Korean Ministry of National Defense and Munitions Industry Department front companies in Laos, China.
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.
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