Social engineering is evolving at breakneck speed, fueled by the rapid advancements in generative AI. This new wave of technology is arming cybercriminals with an arsenal of sophisticated tools to research, manipulate, and exploit organizations more effectively than ever before.

The FBI recently warned: "As technology continues to evolve, so do cybercriminals' tactics." And nowhere is this more evident than in the growing use of AI-powered deception techniques.

In this article, we’ll explore how generative AI is supercharging social engineering, what it means for IT leaders, and how organizations can stay ahead of emerging threats.

More Realistic Pretexting and AI-Enhanced Deception

Traditional social engineering attacks rely on impersonation—someone pretending to be a colleague, a boss, or a trusted partner. Attackers often use phishing emails loaded with psychological triggers, like urgency or authority, to pressure their targets into compliance. Voice-based scams, or vishing, add another layer of credibility by using familiar tones and phrases.

However, these methods have always had weaknesses. Targets could verify a sender’s identity through subtle cues—writing style, voice patterns, or even a quick video call. But now, with generative AI in the mix, attackers can sidestep these barriers entirely.

• Deepfake videos can mimic real people with uncanny accuracy, analyzing speech patterns and mannerisms to create near-flawless digital doubles. With the rise of remote work and virtual meetings, even minor inconsistencies—like awkward lip-syncing or a slightly off voice—can be dismissed as technical glitches.
• Voice cloning lets cybercriminals replicate anyone’s voice with just a short audio sample. This makes vishing attacks far more convincing, allowing fraudsters to impersonate executives, colleagues, or even family members. No wonder OpenAI has recommended that banks phase out voice-based authentication.
• AI-driven language models eliminate language barriers. Attackers can now craft phishing messages in near-native fluency, using regional dialects and linguistic nuances to make their scams more believable. This dramatically expands their reach, allowing them to target businesses worldwide.

AI-Powered OSINT: Weaponizing Public Information

If you’ve ever posted online, you’ve left a digital footprint. A birthday on Facebook, a job title on LinkedIn, vacation photos on Instagram—every piece of information adds to the puzzle. In the past, gathering this intelligence required time-consuming manual effort. Now, AI does it in seconds.

With generative AI, cybercriminals can:

• Scan and analyze public data at scale—identifying connections between people, places, and organizations with unprecedented speed.
• Use facial recognition to track down where someone appears across the internet, building detailed profiles for impersonation.
• Access and aggregate data anonymously, leveraging stolen accounts and dark web tools to evade detection.

What once required advanced hacking skills is now accessible to anyone with the right AI-powered tools.

Mining Stolen Data with AI

Massive data breaches have become a fact of digital life. From Facebook’s 533 million-user leak in 2021 to Yahoo’s exposure of 3 billion accounts in 2024, troves of personal and corporate data are out there, waiting to be exploited.

Manually combing through these leaks would be impossible. But AI changes the game.

• Automated data mining tools sift through enormous datasets, flagging sensitive information that can be used for extortion, identity theft, or corporate espionage.
• Named Entity Recognition (NER) maps relationships between individuals, revealing hidden connections in emails, documents, and transaction records.
• Open-source OSINT tools like Recon-ng make it easier than ever to harvest and organize leaked data for malicious purposes.

Some of the most advanced AI-driven espionage tools, like Red Reaper, are already capable of scanning hundreds of thousands of emails to uncover valuable intelligence. And as AI capabilities continue to grow, so will the scale and sophistication of these attacks.

The AI-Powered Threat Landscape: Are You Prepared?

Cybercriminals now treat the internet like a massive database, using AI to scrape, analyze, and weaponize information in real time. Once they have a single data point—an email, a phone number, a LinkedIn profile—they can launch highly personalized attacks at scale.

The rise of hacking-as-a-service has further democratized cybercrime, making sophisticated attack methods available to a broader range of bad actors. Deepfakes, voice cloning, and AI-generated phishing scams are no longer niche threats—they’re becoming mainstream.

So how do you protect your business?

We’ve built a threat monitoring tool designed to stay one step ahead of AI-powered attacks. It scans the internet for any exposed information about your organization, helping you identify and mitigate risks before they’re exploited.

Want to know what data is out there that could be used against you? Get in touch to learn more.