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.
Kraken advanced a North Korean fake job applicant to unmask his tradecraft
Kraken (Payward, Inc.) · United States
Kraken disclosed in May 2025 that an applicant for an engineering role was a North Korean operative. Rather than reject him, the security team advanced him through the hiring process to study the tradecraft. Red flags included a name that differed from the resume during the first call, voice switching mid-interview, remote colocated Mac desktops behind VPNs, a GitHub profile tied to a breached email address, and an ID that appeared altered. An industry partner's list of email addresses linked to the group contained the exact address he had applied with.
Munchables loses $62.5M to a developer it hired who was linked to North Korea
Munchables (NFT game on Blast) · Unknown
Munchables, a game on the Blast network, lost about $62.5 million in ether on March 26, 2024. Blockchain investigators traced the exploit to a developer the project had hired, who had been given privileged access to the contracts. ZachXBT assessed the developer as likely North Korean based on GitHub commit patterns and links to other accounts. After public pressure the developer handed over all private keys and the funds were recovered.
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?q=DPRK-linked+fake+IT+worker+network.