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 spear-phished election vendor VR Systems, then 122 local election officials
VR Systems and US local election administrators · United States
A leaked NSA analysis described a two-stage Russian military intelligence operation against US election infrastructure in 2016. On 24 August 2016 spoofed Google emails were sent to employees of Florida-based election software vendor VR Systems, directing them to a fake login page; the NSA assessed at least one account was likely compromised. On 31 October and 1 November the operators, using a Gmail account impersonating a VR Systems employee, sent malicious Word documents to 122 addresses at named local government election organisations.
John Podesta and DNC staff phished by fake Google security alerts in 2016
Hillary for America campaign and the Democratic National Committee · United States
On 19 March 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign chairman John Podesta received an email styled as a Google security alert warning that someone had his password and urging him to change it. The Bitly-shortened link led to a credential harvesting page controlled by Russian military intelligence. More than 50,000 of Podesta's emails were later published by WikiLeaks; similar spear phishing was used against DNC staff.
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=Russian+GRU+military+intelligence.