Researchers at Cisco Talos are tracking a sophisticated phishing-as-a-service operator panel called “ARToken” that’s built on the EvilTokens phishing platform. ARToken focuses on targeted social engineering attacks, allowing operators to customize phishing attempts for each victim.

Picture this: Your company just fell victim to a massive data breach. The culprit wasn't a sophisticated malware strain, a zero-day exploit, or a compromised firewall. It was a perfectly legitimate-looking login from a VP’s account, originating from an unrecognized IP address, requesting an urgent wire transfer via a spotless, text-only email.

Threat actors continue to rely on social engineering as AI is incorporated into their attacks, according to ESET’s Threat Report for the first half of 2026.

ESET’s Director of Threat Prevention Labs, Jiří Kropáč, stated, “Rather than relying on entirely new methods and tools, attackers are quickly adapting established techniques to new platforms, technologies, and user behaviors. The number of AI skills within this new ecosystem is growing rapidly as we speak, further expanding the attack surface.”

The ClickFix social engineering technique is now the top malware delivery method, according to a new report from ReliaQuest. These attacks trick users into copying a malicious command, then pasting it into a terminal and running it on their computers.

Scammers can use AI tools to find your location in photos you post to social media, according to researchers at McAfee. This information can then be used in targeted social engineering attacks. The researchers found that free AI models can correctly identify a photo’s location with around 90% accuracy.

Threat actors continue to use AI tools to automate their attack flows and increase efficiency, according to researchers at ReliaQuest.

An initial access broker associated with the Payouts King ransomware group is using Microsoft Teams phishing to deploy a malicious Microsoft Edge web browser extension, according to researchers at Zscaler. Once the hackers have a foothold within an organization, they sell the access to the ransomware gang to conduct follow-on attacks.

Threat actors are abusing Shop, a legitimate app developed by Shopify, to launch phishing attacks, according to researchers at Gen Digital. Shop is used for making purchases and tracking orders, but threat actors are exploiting the platform to generate in-app notifications for phony invoices.

A phishing campaign is targeting small businesses across Europe, Asia, the Middle East, and the United States with emails that impersonate Interpol’s cybercrime investigation unit, researchers at Bitdefender report.

Boxers will often say, the punches that hurt the most aren’t the ones which are thrown with the most force, but the ones they didn’t see coming. I think the same is true in cybersecurity. It’s not the most advanced technically efficient, 0-day utilizing attacks that have the biggest impact, but rather those quiet ones. With no malware or suspicious login at three in the morning from an IP address in a country your company has never done business with. No alert fires. No dashboard turns red.

There’s an important metric that can tell you exactly how vulnerable your high-risk employees and departments are to the next generation of social engineering.