A Lithuanian fraud ring impersonated a real Taiwanese hardware supplier, Quanta Computer, and used spoofed emails and forged invoices to trick Google and Facebook into wiring over $120 million to attacker-controlled bank accounts between 2013 and 2015.
ConfirmedChinese 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 source code, targeted Gmail accounts of human-rights activists, and led Google to publicly confront China and stop censoring its search results.
ConfirmedIn the same January 12, 2010 blog post disclosing Operation Aurora, Google revealed that dozens of Gmail accounts belonging to human-rights activists in the US, China, and Europe had been "routinely accessed by third parties, most likely via phishing scams or malware," a separate, longer-running espionage campaign against individual activists, distinct from the corporate network intrusion.
Social Engineering Examples