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.
Russian state-linked actors phish app-specific passwords from academics and critics
Academics, journalists and Russia critics (individuals not named) · Multiple
Google Threat Intelligence and Citizen Lab jointly documented a campaign in June 2025 in which a Russian government-linked cluster tracked as UNC6293 persuaded targets to create Google application-specific passwords and hand them over. Victims included prominent academics and critics of Russia. The technique bypassed multi-factor authentication entirely and gave the attackers durable mailbox access.
One Treasure Island nonprofit loses $650,000 to hijacked email thread
One Treasure Island · United States
One Treasure Island, a San Francisco nonprofit serving low-income residents, lost $650,000 after criminals compromised its bookkeeper's email account, inserted themselves into an existing email thread and requested a change to wire instructions for a grant payment. Executive director Sherry Williams pursued the funds herself, contacting the receiving bank in Odessa, Texas and seeking help from senators before the Secret Service opened an inquiry.
Save the Children Federation loses nearly $1 million in charity BEC fraud
Save the Children Federation, Inc. · United States
In May 2017 an attacker took over a Save the Children employee's email account and created fraudulent invoices and payment documents for solar panels supposedly destined for health centers in Pakistan. Nearly $1 million was wired to an entity in Japan instead. Insurance covered most of the loss, leaving roughly $112,000 unrecovered. The incident became public in December 2018 when a journalist found the diversion disclosed in the charity's IRS filing.
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=Nonprofit.