How Social Engineering Exploits Human Behavior in Enterprises

What is Social Engineering

Social engineering coerces people into unsafe actions that defeat organizational and personal security. Attackers persuade employees to reveal passwords, run untrusted software, approve fraudulent payments, or otherwise act in ways that hand adversaries access, data, or funds. These are not technical exploits; they are behavioral failures weaponized at scale, transforming routine work and trusted communication into the easiest path to compromise.

A phishing email requesting a password reset, a voice call posing as IT support, or a text message from a “delivery service” asking for payment details are just a few examples. Each is designed to look legitimate and feel familiar. By mirroring the tone, timing, and context of genuine business communication, attackers disguise manipulation as normal workflow.

The impact is measurable and persistent. More than 90% of breaches still originate from human behavior rather than technical flaws. As organizations grow more connected through distributed teams, collaboration tools, and real-time messaging, the user layer has remained the most exposed – and most frequently targeted – point of entry for attackers.  

How Social Engineering Works

Many campaigns begin with reconnaissance. Attackers collect information about people, teams, and workflows to understand who communicates with whom, what language they use, and how business processes move. They often start with open-source intelligence (OSINT) from social media, corporate sites, and public directories, then expand with non-public sources like leaked credentials or breached records. The goal is to reduce uncertainty and increase credibility.

With these insights, attackers craft engagements that align with the victim’s environment. Job title, reporting line, recent activity, and communication style all guide the approach. The attack may unfold as a single convincing request or as a coordinated, multi-channel sequence that builds trust over time.

Once trust is exploited, attackers can deploy malware, move laterally, or harvest data for fraud and espionage. The efficiency is the appeal: manipulating people is faster, cheaper, and more scalable than defeating hardened systems.

Why Social Engineering Works

Social engineering succeeds because it targets predictable human instincts. Attackers understand how people respond to trust, authority, and emotion – especially under pressure. Most campaigns rely on one or more of the following psychological levers.

Familiarity and Trust

Familiarity lowers skepticism. Messages that mirror internal phrasing, known brands, or existing workflows feel safe. Attackers exploit this by imitating recognizable identities – vendors, colleagues, or departments – to make malicious requests seem routine.

Authority and Hierarchy

People instinctively defer to authority. Attackers impersonate executives, regulators, or IT administrators to invoke credibility and urgency. When a message appears to come from power, it commands attention and turns a request into an instruction.

Fear and Urgency

Pressure accelerates poor decisions. By fabricating deadlines, emergencies, or financial risks, attackers push targets to act before verifying. Controlling tempo is key – rushed actions bypass reflection and oversight.

Curiosity and Helpfulness

Some attacks exploit positive instincts rather than fear. Prompts to review new benefits, join internal surveys, or preview shared resources trigger curiosity and cooperation – engaging well-intentioned users.

Reward and Opportunity

Promising gain or recognition reduces caution. Attackers use incentives like bonuses, discounts, or job offers to justify unsafe actions and encourage participation.

These levers remain consistent even as delivery channels evolve, and are especially dangerous when employees are under pressure, distracted, or fatigued. Until organizations can identify and influence these behavioral drivers in real time, the user layer will remain the attacker’s most efficient point of entry.

Common Types of Social Engineering

Social engineering manifests through multiple communication channels, each adapting familiar tactics to exploit trust and urgency.

Mass Phishing

Large-scale email campaigns impersonate trusted brands or systems to prompt unsafe actions such as clicking malicious links or entering credentials. These messages thrive on volume; success requires only a fraction of responses. In 2025, 85% of enterprise CISOs surveyed by Dune Security cited phishing as their top social engineering concern, underscoring how persistent and costly email-based attacks remain despite years of investment in technical defenses.

Spear Phishing

Highly targeted campaigns reference real people, projects, or events. Built from reconnaissance, these lures appear contextual and legitimate, making them among the hardest to detect.

Business Email Compromise

Business Email Compromise (BEC) is a fraud-driven manipulation that impersonates trusted business identities to obtain money, credentials, or sensitive data. Attackers are opportunistic and persistent, using account takeovers, domain spoofing, forged invoices, and corroborating messages to bypass verification and approvals. One authoritative, seemingly legitimate request can be enough to trigger severe financial, operational, or reputational damage – especially when the target is a senior executive. Whaling, a high-value subset of BEC, specifically targets these leaders to maximize impact.

Smishing and Vishing

Smishing (SMS-based phishing) and vishing (voice-based phishing) extend social engineering to mobile and phone channels to impersonate trusted entities like HR, banks, or IT support. These channels feel personal and urgent, and because they often fall outside corporate monitoring, they present a critical blind spot. Vishing attacks rose 442% in the second half of 2024 alone, underscoring how quickly attackers are scaling voice-based manipulation.

Collaboration and Encrypted Platforms

Informal collaboration tools – such as Slack, Teams, and LinkedIn messages – and encrypted consumer apps like WhatsApp, Signal, Telegram, and Viber have become frequent targets to manipulate trust and bypass enterprise controls. On Telegram alone, scams surged 121% in the second half of 2024.

Physical Social Engineering

Physical social engineering exploits everyday norms of access and helpfulness. Common tactics include tailgating through secured doors, posing as delivery drivers or contractors to gain unattended access, shoulder surfing to observe credentials, planting infected USBs or devices in communal areas, and dumpster diving for sensitive documents.

Attackers increasingly chain channels – an email followed by a text or call that validates the request, then a chat or meeting that closes the loop. That orchestration builds credibility, erodes suspicion, and turns routine workflows into engineered pathways to compromise.  

Social Engineering Defense

Social engineering is notoriously difficult to detect and prevent. A single human decision can compromise an entire organization, no matter how advanced its security stack. Legacy Security Awareness Training (SAT) programs have proven ineffective at addressing this risk.

Dune Security’s User Adaptive Risk Management platform solves what legacy training can’t. It comprehensively quantifies and individually reduces user risk – simulating real-world, multi-channel attacks, scoring risk in real time, and automating defenses to reduce exposure across the enterprise. By transforming behavioral data into actionable defense, Dune turns human behavior into a measurable, manageable part of enterprise security – stopping social engineering where it starts.

Key capabilities include:

• User Adaptive Testing: Launch continuous attack simulations – phishing, smishing, vishing, deepfakes – tailored to each user’s context. Capture true behavioral risk with precision. ‍
• User Risk Scoring: Continuously evaluate each employee based on behavioral patterns, business impact, and integrated third-party signals to generate live, dynamic risk profiles. ‍
• User Adaptive Training: Fully automated, compliance-ready, and role-specific. Training intensity adjusts dynamically based on individual user risk –high-risk employees receive targeted, just-in-time reinforcement aligned to their demonstrated vulnerabilities, while low-risk users stay focused on their work without unnecessary disruption.  ‍
• Unified Visibility: Consolidates identity, endpoint, and behavioral risk signals into a single live dashboard, giving security teams a complete, contextual view of user-layer exposure across departments, geographies, and systems. ‍
• Adaptive Workflows: Translates live user-risk signals into automated security actions. When risk rises, Dune dynamically enforces controls such as MFA, access throttling, or session timeouts, while alerting SecOps for intervention. These adaptive responses mitigate exposure instantly, reducing the window of opportunity for attackers.

Attackers have learned to weaponize trust – Dune gives organizations the visibility and control to defend it, turning human behavior into a measurable and defensible layer of enterprise security.