Social engineering incidents
277 entries spanning 1995 to 2026. Filter by how the attacker reached the human, what it cost, and whether AI was involved.
GRU spearphishing of the Clinton campaign, DNC and DCCC
Hillary Clinton presidential campaign, Democratic National Committee and Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee · United States
A federal grand jury indictment announced on 13 July 2018 charged twelve Russian GRU officers with hacking offences related to the 2016 US election. According to the Department of Justice, officers in Unit 26165 began spearphishing volunteers and employees of the Clinton presidential campaign, including the campaign's chairman, and used the same methods against the DCCC and DNC to obtain usernames and passwords, steal emails and documents, monitor employee activity and implant malicious code.
IRS 'Get Transcript' abused to pull 334,000 taxpayer transcripts
US taxpayers via the Internal Revenue Service (multi-victim campaign) · United States
In August 2015 the IRS disclosed that criminals had successfully retrieved prior-year tax transcripts for roughly 334,000 taxpayers through its online Get Transcript service, having attempted access against about 610,000 taxpayers. The Treasury Inspector General later put the potentially compromised total higher. Attackers defeated the service's knowledge-based authentication rather than breaching IRS systems.
Sarah Palin Yahoo email account taken over via password-reset questions
Sarah Palin (then Governor of Alaska and vice-presidential candidate) · United States
During the 2008 US presidential campaign, David C. Kernell gained unauthorized access to then-Governor Sarah Palin's personal Yahoo email account by resetting its password. Screenshots of the contents were posted publicly. Kernell was convicted and, on 12 November 2010, sentenced to one year and one day in prison plus three years of supervised release.
Entry types: Incident, Campaign, Benchmark. Aggregate agency statistics are kept as benchmarks and are never summed into the counters. Methodology. Machine-readable version of this page: global-social-engineering-impact-da.vercel.app/api/incidents?sector=Government.