What Is Vishing? How Voice Phishing Works and How to Stop It

Social engineering is no longer confined to email.

Voice has become one of the most persuasive – and least defended – attack vectors in the enterprise. Attackers have moved beyond desktops and inboxes to deploy convincing phone calls that bypass legacy defenses entirely.  

Vishing (short for voice phishing) is now a consistent driver of enterprise breaches. According to the FBI, vishing-related financial losses have surged 550% since 2022, while attack volume spiked 442% in the second half of 2024 (FBI IC3; CrowdStrike, 2025).  

That rise isn’t random. It reflects a broader shift in adversary behavior: toward AI-assisted, multi-channel social engineering that sidesteps traditional perimeter controls and targets people directly.

These attacks don’t rely on malware or malicious links. Instead, vishing manipulates user behavior in real time, exploiting urgency, trust, and procedural familiarity. A single phone call, delivered at the right moment with the right voice, can redirect funds, expose credentials, or escalate access without triggering a single alert.

Vishing Explained: How Attackers Use Voice to Gain Access

Voice phishing is a form of social engineering in which attackers impersonate trusted individuals – such as executives, IT support, HR staff, or third-party vendors – over the phone to extract sensitive information, authorize financial activity, or gain internal access.

These attacks are delivered either live or via AI-generated audio. Some rely on human callers applying pressure in real time. Others scale through synthetic voice models that mimic organizational tone and cadence to sound legitimate.

Because voice feels personal and immediate, users are more likely to act reflexively – especially when a request references familiar systems, roles, or procedures. Vishing exploits this human moment of decision, using urgency and role-based authority to override skepticism and fast-track compliance.

To make these calls feel routine and credible, attackers use a growing range of tactics:

• ‍AI voice cloning: Mirrors tone, cadence, and identity of known individuals ‍
• Caller ID spoofing: Displays as internal extensions or trusted contacts ‍
• Workflow mirroring: References legitimate systems, tools, or org structure ‍
• Data reuse: Incorporates leaked or scraped org data to build credibility ‍
• Urgency and emotional pressure: Delivered live or pre-recorded to lower resistance

There’s no link to inspect. No attachment to scan. The breach starts with a voice that sounds real.

Modern Vishing Tactics Attackers Use to Sound Legitimate

Vishing attacks succeed because they sound credible. Each tactic is engineered to mirror legitimate workflows, impersonate real roles, and apply just enough pressure to override hesitation. Below are some of the most exploited – and costly – enterprise scenarios:

Executive Impersonation

A caller poses as a senior executive, requesting urgent, confidential action. The tone, familiarity, and implied authority push users to comply without following standard verification protocols.

Common risks: Fraudulent wire transfers, document exfiltration, bypassed controls
Why it works: Authority, urgency, and workflow familiarity  

IT Helpdesk Spoofing

A fake IT support caller instructs the user to reset MFA credentials, reverify access, or install remote desktop tools, often under the guise of troubleshooting. These calls often mimic real internal language and target employees during off-hours.

Common risks: Credential harvesting, unauthorized access, lateral movement  
Why it works: Procedural mimicry and immediate pressure

Vendor or Third-Party Impersonation

Attackers impersonate external partners, including SaaS providers, payroll processors, or BPOs to request credential resets, portal access, or payment changes. In some cases, insiders are bribed to facilitate the breach.

Common Risk: Data exposure, financial diversion, insider-linked compromise
Why it works: Third-party trust, contract familiarity, and low-friction access

Other variants are also growing in frequency and impact – such as payroll diversion scams targeting HR, or legal and compliance-themed impersonation designed to pressure users through fear and urgency. All of these attack paths exploit the same blind spot: a voice that sounds legitimate and bypasses traditional monitoring channels.

Vishing vs. Phishing and Smishing: Key Differences

Phishing, smishing, and vishing all rely on the same core principle: exploit human trust to gain access. What sets them apart is how – and where – that trust is manipulated.

While email and SMS-based attacks can be flagged, scanned, or redirected, voice-based attacks cannot. Vishing attacks happen in real time, leave little forensic evidence, and rely on emotional realism, not malicious code.

How Enterprises Can Defend Against Vishing

Attackers are leaning into vishing for a reason: it works. Voice-based social engineering bypasses traditional defenses and strikes during moments of trust – when employees are busy, distracted, or trying to be helpful.

Most awareness programs weren’t designed for this. Dune Security’s 2025 Global Insider Threat Intelligence Report found that while nearly all enterprises test for email phishing, only 15% simulate vishing – despite most enterprise CISOs ranking it a top concern. This readiness gap leaves users trained to question suspicious emails but unprepared to challenge a familiar-sounding voice making a plausible request.  

Voice is the ideal medium for inducing action under pressure. It feels urgent, authoritative, and personal. Static simulations and checklist training don’t prepare users for fast, emotionally charged voice attacks that feel routine and legitimate. This behavioral gap is exactly what vishing exploits.

Stopping vishing requires more than technical controls. It demands a behavior-first defense model: one that adapts to individual user risk, detects deception in real time, and embeds resilience at the moment of decision.  

‍

Dune Security Closes the User Layer Gap

Dune replaces legacy security awareness training and phishing simulations with a platform purpose-built for how today’s attacks actually work.

Our User Adaptive Risk Management solution identifies, simulates, and mitigates user layer risk in real time, across phishing, smishing, vishing, insider threats, and more.

Key capabilities include:

• Adaptive Attack Simulations: Simulates realistic phishing, smishing, and deepfake scenarios that automatically adapt to each user’s role, behavior, and past performance – making every test relevant and unpredictable. ‍
• Risk-Based Adaptive Training: Automatically delivers training specific to each user's demonstrated weaknesses, role and risk level. No irrelevant content, no wasted time. ‍
• Live Risk Scoring: Scores each user in real time based on their business impact, behavior, training history, and response to real-world simulated attacks, powering targeted defense across the user layer. ‍
• Adaptive Controls: Auto-generates SecOps or IAM tickets based on user risk, dynamically enforces MFA, access throttling, and session timeouts, and closes the loop between detection and action to contain threats before they spread.

To deepen user awareness around vishing specifically, Dune Security is launching the Vishing Playground this month, a new feature that lets users hear a cloned version of their own voice in seconds. Built using Dune’s in-house voice clone modeling, the Playground gives users a safe but startling look at how quickly their voice can be captured, replicated, and potentially weaponized. It’s a fast, immersive way to show exactly why voice-based deception is rising, and what’s at stake if it’s ignored.

Your users are your primary risk surface. Dune gives security teams the visibility, automation, and control needed to detect deception, reduce risk, and defend the human layer at scale.