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.
Charter Communications breach of 4.9M accounts began with an Entra vishing call
Charter Communications (Spectrum) · United States
ShinyHunters compromised an employee's Microsoft Entra account at Charter Communications through a voice phishing attack on 1 April 2026 and reached the company's Salesforce instance. Have I Been Pwned counted 4.9 million unique accounts in the leaked dataset; the attackers claimed 42 million records. Exposed fields included names, email and physical addresses, phone numbers and plan information, plus roughly 85,000 internal employee directory rows. Charter refused the ransom and the data was published.
Odido staff phished then called by fake IT department, exposing 6.2 million Dutch customers
Odido (and subsidiary Ben) · Netherlands
Dutch mobile operator Odido detected a cyberattack on its customer contact system over the weekend of 7 February 2026 and disclosed it on 13 February. Dutch public broadcaster NOS reported that attackers first harvested customer service employees' passwords with phishing emails, then telephoned those employees while posing as Odido's own ICT department to get them to approve the fraudulent login attempts and bypass two-factor authentication. The system reached was Odido's Salesforce environment, from which customer data was scraped in bulk. About 6.2 million current and former Odido and Ben customers were notified, and the breach was reported to the Dutch Data Protection Authority.
Odido: IT impersonation calls and MFA approval requests expose 6.2M customers
Odido · Netherlands
Dutch mobile operator Odido, formerly T-Mobile Netherlands, disclosed in February 2026 that attackers reached its Salesforce CRM and scraped data on 6.2 million customers. Exposed fields included names, addresses, phone numbers, customer IDs, bank account numbers, dates of birth and government identification numbers such as passport and driving licence details. Network services were unaffected and no group claimed the breach.
Manhattan indicts SIM-swap ring that used AT&T and T-Mobile store insiders
AT&T and T-Mobile customers, including four Manhattan residents · United States
Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced an eleven-defendant indictment on November 20, 2025 against a SIM-swapping and identity theft ring that included four AT&T and T-Mobile retail employees. Between October 2021 and July 2022 the ring stole $435,000 from four Manhattan residents, with further victims elsewhere. The insiders used their employee access to perform the swaps in exchange for payment, and in some cases logged in with coworkers' credentials to obscure their involvement.
LAPSUS$ repeatedly targeted T-Mobile staff to reach internal tools and source code
T-Mobile US · United States
Leaked internal chat logs published by Krebs on Security in April 2022 showed that the LAPSUS$ extortion group repeatedly compromised T-Mobile employee accounts in March 2022. On 19 March the group reached Atlas, an internal T-Mobile tool for managing customer accounts, and used Slack and Bitbucket access to download more than 30,000 source code repositories in about twelve hours. T-Mobile confirmed the intrusion and said no customer or government information was obtained.
Mobile carrier employee took $500-a-day bribes to perform SIM swaps
Unnamed US mobile carrier ('Phone Company A') and at least 19 of its customers · United States
A US Attorney's Office charged a former mobile phone company employee with accepting bribes to perform unauthorized SIM swaps on customer accounts. Between October 20 and November 9, 2018, a co-conspirator sent him customer phone numbers, four-digit PINs and destination SIM numbers, and he executed the swaps from inside the carrier's systems. At least 19 customers were targeted in the wider conspiracy, including a New Orleans physician.
Kevin Mitnick's telecom pretexting campaign and 1995 arrest
Pacific Bell, Digital Equipment Corporation and other telecommunications and computer firms · United States
Kevin Mitnick was arrested by the FBI in Raleigh, North Carolina on 15 February 1995 and found with cloned cellular phones, more than 100 cloned cellular phone codes and multiple pieces of false identification. In 1999 he pleaded guilty to four counts of wire fraud, two counts of computer fraud and one count of illegally intercepting wire communications, and admitted copying proprietary software from large cellular telephone and computer companies. He was sentenced to 46 months plus 22 months for violating supervised release. His case is the formative reference point for social engineering as a discipline.
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=Telecom.