AI-Assisted Social Engineering Assaults Proceed to Rise

Social engineering remained the highest preliminary entry vector for cyberattacks in 2025, with growing help from AI instruments, in keeping with a report from ThreatDown. The researchers warn that AI will seemingly develop into a core element of social engineering assaults all through 2026.

“Deepfake voice, picture, and video impersonation now requires minimal experience and solely a handful of reference photographs or seconds of audio,” the researchers write.

“Criminals are utilizing these capabilities throughout a large spectrum of assaults: creating fabricated IDs for monetary fraud; mimicking IT or helpdesk employees to influence workers to share passwords, reset multi-factor authentication (MFA), or approve distant entry; and impersonating executives to conduct extremely convincing types of CEO fraud.

“ThreatDown expects AI-driven social engineering operations to scale considerably all through 2026 and to emerge because the dominant type of social engineering utilized by attackers.”

Attackers have already extensively adopted AI to generate phishing lures. Generative AI instruments permit menace actors to craft real looking phishing emails with no typos, even when the attacker doesn’t have a superb grasp of the goal’s language.

“Phishing campaigns used acquainted manufacturers and plausible lures like safe doc downloads,” ThreatDown says. “More and more, attackers relied on AI-generated emails to remove the errors that many depend on to establish phishing and to provide extra polished, convincingly personalised messages at scale.

“Utilizing easy methods comparable to checking MX data, attackers served victims faux variations of Google or OneDrive login screens tied to the victims’ personal domains. In some circumstances, victims had been redirected to their actual inboxes after harvesting credentials to reduce suspicion.”

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ThreatDown has the story.