The Psychology of Social Engineering

The power of psychology, people, and persuasion is essential to successful social engineering attacks.

In social engineering, cyber attackers target people rather than systems. While seeking access to sensitive information is a common goal in cybercrime, social engineering tactics are novel and rooted in human behavior.

Attackers victimize individuals with targeted, often personalized, emails, texts, hyperlinks, and — increasingly — phone calls and video messages generated by artificial intelligence. People who believe the deception in these custom messages frequently take unsafe, emotionally driven actions: revealing personal information, clicking on dangerous links, opening unsafe attachments, or authorizing fraudulent wire transfers.

According to Verizon's 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, approximately 60% of cyber breaches involve a human element: an employee falling victim to phishing, pretexting, or another form of social manipulation. These risks are disproportionately concentrated at smaller organizations: SMB employees face significantly more targeted social engineering attempts per person than their counterparts at large enterprises.

The financial consequences are real. Coalition's 2026 Cyber Claims Report found that 71% of funds transfer fraud (FTF) claims, in which an attacker redirects a legitimate payment to a fraudulent account, involved social engineering as the primary attack vector with average losses of $127,00 per incident. Social engineering is not just a technical nuisance; it is the leading mechanism behind cyber theft.

How social engineering exploits human psychology 

Social engineering attacks exploit human psychology by taking advantage of people's natural behaviors, emotions, and motivations. In a professional setting, these include the willingness to open and respond to personalized emails, accept demands for electronic payments, or search for engaging or sensationalized news online.  

Approximately 60% of cyber breaches involve a human element — Verizon, 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report

Attackers tailor their exploits around predictable responses and expected behaviors. For example, when an employee opens an email using their name, that's expected behavior. It appears personal and directed at that individual. Such an email is a classic phishing tactic and social engineering exploit that inspires trust through familiarity.

Attackers want targets to willingly provide sensitive information or access to company systems and assets. Targets often help social engineers because their requests appear legitimate and offer a gift, discount, or exciting news. However, they don't realize they are putting their organizations at risk.

Trust

Trust is one of the most common ways to exploit human psychology in social engineering. Attackers gather personal information on social media or employee forums, learn about work routines, and gain insights into behavioral patterns. They then customize their tactics, establishing trust within the first few moments of an interaction by appearing to know the target, their role, and their relationships.

AI has made trust-based attacks significantly more dangerous. Attackers can now generate personalized spear phishing emails at scale, mimicking the writing style of a specific executive or colleague, reducing the typos and awkward phrasing that once made phishing messages easier to identify.

Fear and urgency

Fear and urgency in social engineering cause people to act without due diligence. Many messages convey a sense of urgency, and urgency accompanied by a threat inspires hasty action. An example is the threat of not paying a so-called overdue invoice with the warning of account closure. Urgency short-circuits rational evaluation, which is precisely why attackers weaponize it.

Curiosity

Human curiosity plays a role in social engineering exploits. Attackers use enticing information and exciting headlines to tempt targets into clicking malicious links. Once they open the link, targets may provide sensitive information or download malware, following their curiosity into a trap.

Real-world examples of social engineering

Social engineering attacks come in various forms, ranging from tried-and-true tactics like phishing and impersonation to more novel methods like SEO poisoning and AI-generated deepfakes. Below are examples we've witnessed at Coalition and in the broader threat landscape:

Phishing

Phishing is a type of social engineering in which an attacker tries to trick victims into sharing sensitive information, such as account credentials, financial data, or access to internal systems. Attackers sometimes ask users to provide information voluntarily; in others, attackers prompt users to click a link or download an attachment they believe is legitimate.

Impersonation

Impersonation attacks are a form of social engineering in which attackers pose as family members, trusted colleagues, vendors, or clients to deceive employees into granting access to systems, facilities, or sensitive data.

SEO poisoning

Search engine optimization (SEO) poisoning is a technique that leverages search engines to trick users into clicking links that appear legitimate but are malicious. Attackers manipulate search engine rankings to make harmful web pages rank highly in common searches, then use this technique to carry out different types of cyber attacks.

AI-enhanced social engineering

Artificial intelligence has introduced a new generation of social engineering attacks that exploit the same psychological triggers — trust, urgency, and curiosity — but at a level of realism that is increasingly difficult to detect. Three categories have emerged as particularly dangerous:

Deepfake video impersonation

Attackers create synthetic video of executives, clients, or colleagues — realistic enough to conduct a live video call. In one widely reported incident, UK engineering firm Arup lost $25.6 million after an employee participated in a video conference with what appeared to be the company's CFO and other senior colleagues. All participants, except the victim, were deepfakes. The attack is notable because it bypassed a natural defense: seeing the person's face. That defense no longer holds reliably.

Voice cloning and vishing

Research from McAfee found that just three seconds of audio (a voicemail, a podcast clip, a social media video) is sufficient to create an 85% accurate clone of a person's voice. AI cloning tools are now widely accessible, and voice cloning has crossed what researchers call the "indistinguishable threshold": Human listeners can no longer reliably tell a cloned voice from the real one. Attackers use these tools to impersonate executives authorizing wire transfers, IT staff requesting credentials, or family members in distress, a digital update to the classic grandparent scam.

Voice cloning has crossed the "indistinguishable threshold." Human listeners can no longer reliably distinguish a cloned voice from the real one.

AI-generated spear phishing

Traditional phishing relied on volume. AI changes the calculus: attackers can now generate highly personalized, grammatically correct, contextually accurate phishing emails at scale. By pulling information from LinkedIn, public filings, or company websites, AI tools can craft a message that references the recipient's role, recent projects, and colleagues by name, dramatically increasing both open rates and compliance with the attacker's request.

Strengthening defenses against social engineering

Be proactive and strengthen your individual and business defenses against social engineering threats. Start by recognizing and resisting the psychological triggers and then layer in specific practices to counter AI-enhanced attacks.

Trust is human nature, and so is discernment

Understand that trusting and responding to personalized messages is human nature, but should come with increased scrutiny. Consider a few things before responding to an email sent directly to you:

• Would a business contact try to manipulate or ask you for money via email or text?

• Is the message well-written? If not — or if it's unusually urgent — consider why.

• Confirm the email address carefully. If it's a text, check the phone number it's coming from. Do you recognize it?

• If there is a link in the email, do not immediately click it. Instead, hover over it and look for misspellings or discrepancies in the URL (e.g., go0gle.co vs. google.com).

• If unsure, don't respond directly. Report it to your IT department.

Watch for red flags and verify legitimacy

Verify legitimacy by cross-checking and confirming messages from independent sources. Call the vendor's main number, check the company's official website, or confirm with a colleague through a separate channel. Even a seemingly legitimate message requesting sensitive information or login credentials is a red flag.

Your bank will never ask for personally identifiable information via email or text. If unsure, call the bank directly using contact information from its website, not from the message itself. Chances are, you will confirm it's a fraud.

Apply secondary-channel verification for financial and access requests

This defense deserves its own entry because it is the single most effective control against both traditional and AI-enhanced social engineering. Any request should require a separate, out-of-band confirmation, including:

• Authorizing a payment or wire transfer

• Changing banking or payment details

• Granting system access or credentials

• An urgent request from an executive (even via phone call or video) that bypasses normal process

If the CFO calls to authorize an emergency wire transfer, call the CFO back using a number from your company directory — not a number from the message or the caller ID. This step alone stops the vast majority of BEC, vishing, and deepfake impersonation attacks.

Coalition's 2026 Cyber Claims Report found that 52% of funds transfer fraud claims originated from a business email compromise (BEC) event, where an attacker had email access and used it to set up or time the fraudulent payment request. Timely reporting is also the deciding factor in recovery.

Don't react, act

Develop and use your critical thinking skills. Attackers want to elicit an emotional response, disrupting your ability to think clearly. They address you personally, demand immediate action, warn you that failure to comply will lead to severe consequences, and tempt you with sensationalized information.

These tactics inhibit rational thinking and encourage hurried actions. Don't react. Validate and confirm. Ask a colleague or call the vendor directly to check on the validity of the message, and check a website you trust to verify "exciting news" before clicking an unknown link.

Take five minutes, and you may determine that the message was a social engineering attack. That pause can save your organization significant time, money, reputational damage, and more.

Prioritize security awareness training

Awareness is the best defense against social engineering attacks. Regardless of size, every business benefits from educating its employees about how humans are susceptible to such exploits and the specific risks of social engineering. Verizon's 2025 DBIR found that 8% of employees account for 80% of incidents — targeted, ongoing training for repeat clickers can produce outsized returns.

When employees understand how to identify and report potential social engineering scams, their organizations benefit. By increasing awareness around phishing emails, impersonation attempts, SEO poisoning, and AI-enhanced attacks, employees help protect the systems, data, and finances their organizations depend on.

Regardless of size, every business can benefit from educating its employees about how humans are susceptible to such exploits and the risks of social engineering to individuals.

Make a greater investment in employee awareness

Employees can become security-aware through Coalition Security Awareness Training. Our program helps SMBs educate employees about cyber threats, reduce cyber risk, and enable organizations to meet compliance training requirements. Key training benefits include:

Phishing exercises and content

• Exercises that reveal the signs of hidden phishing tactics in email scams, fraudulent messages, invoice change requests, gift card requests, and more

• Customizable simulations testing employees on their ability to identify and report phishing attacks, including AI-crafted phishing scenarios

General and extensive training

• A regularly updated 200+ library of easily deployable training videos in multiple languages

• Pre-designed three-level courses based on security awareness with automated campaigns and reminders to encourage training completion, lessening the burden on IT departments

Compliance courses

• Courses in cybersecurity training requirements for industry compliance standards, including SOC2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, and more

Coalition Security Awareness Training is available globally inside Coalition Control®, our unified cyber risk management platform. Log in or sign up and start a free trial directly in Control. 

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