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.
MGM Resorts shut down for ten days after a help desk social engineering call
MGM Resorts International · United States
MGM Resorts disclosed a cybersecurity issue on 12 September 2023 that took hotel reservation systems, digital room keys, slot machines and its website offline across US properties for about ten days. In its Q3 2023 filing MGM reported roughly $100 million of negative impact to Las Vegas Strip adjusted property EBITDAR, plus under $10 million in one-time costs, and said personal data of customers who transacted before March 2019 was stolen, including names, contact details, dates of birth and driver's licence numbers, and Social Security and passport numbers for a subset. Scattered Spider, working with ALPHV/BlackCat, claimed responsibility.
Caesars pays reported $15M ransom after outsourced IT vendor is socially engineered
Caesars Entertainment · United States
Caesars told the SEC that a social engineering attack on an outsourced IT support vendor gave attackers unauthorised access on 18 August 2023, with data taken on 23 August and the incident discovered on 7 September. The loyalty programme database was stolen, including Social Security and driver's licence numbers; roughly 41,397 Maine residents were among those notified. Caesars reportedly paid millions to prevent publication. Payment card and bank account data were not accessed.
Riot Games loses League of Legends source code to a social engineering attack
Riot Games · United States
Riot Games disclosed in January 2023 that attackers used social engineering to compromise its development environment and steal source code for League of Legends and Teamfight Tactics along with a legacy anti-cheat platform. The company received a ransom email demanding $10 million and publicly refused to pay. Riot said no player data or personal information was compromised, but the intrusion disrupted its build pipeline and delayed game patches.
Activision breached after an HR employee falls for an SMS phishing message
Activision Blizzard · United States
Activision confirmed in February 2023 that it had suffered a breach on 4 December 2022 after an employee in the human resources department responded to an SMS phishing message. Researchers who surfaced the incident said the attacker gained access to internal Slack, an employee data set and Activision's content release calendar, including planned Call of Duty content. Activision said it had addressed the incident promptly and that sensitive employee data was not exfiltrated in bulk.
Rockstar Games internal Slack breached and GTA 6 footage leaked
Rockstar Games · United States
An actor using the handle teapotuberhacker, the same persona behind the Uber intrusion days earlier, posted roughly 90 in-development Grand Theft Auto VI videos and claimed to hold GTA V and GTA VI source code, saying they had reached Rockstar's internal Slack and Confluence. Rockstar confirmed a network intrusion and unauthorised access to early development footage. A UK teenager, Arion Kurtaj, was later convicted and in December 2023 given an indefinite hospital order.
Electronic Arts source code stolen via Slack cookie and IT help desk impersonation
Electronic Arts · United States
In June 2021 attackers stole roughly 780GB of data from Electronic Arts, including source code for FIFA 21 and the Frostbite game engine. The intruders told Motherboard they bought stolen authentication cookies for about $10, used them to enter EA's Slack workspace, then messaged EA IT support claiming to have lost their phone at a party and asking for a new multifactor token. The request was granted twice, giving them corporate network access.
Hacker bribed a Roblox support contractor to access user data and reset accounts
Roblox Corporation · United States
A hacker bribed a Roblox customer support representative, listed publicly as an in-game support contractor, to obtain access to the company's customer support panel. The panel exposed personal data on Roblox's user base and allowed password resets, removal of two-factor authentication, account bans and data changes. Roblox said it acted immediately, notified the small number of affected customers, and reported the hacker to HackerOne.
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=Gaming+%26+Casino.