The threat of social engineering on everyday people is evolving at an alarming pace. Tactics that once relied on phishing emails and fraudulent phone calls have been supercharged by the emergence of generative AI and deepfakes.
These technologies offer bad actors tools to manipulate, deceive, and defraud at unprecedented scales. For cybersecurity professionals, particularly in finance, government, and enterprise security, understanding the psychology behind social engineering — and how modern technologies like deepfakes exploit it — is critical to staying one step ahead of cybercriminals.
Social engineering refers to the psychological manipulation of individuals to gain access to sensitive information, assets, or systems. Instead of hacking technology, social engineers "hack" people, exploiting cognitive biases, emotional responses, and trust. A classic example might involve an attacker impersonating a company executive via email to trick employees into transferring funds or sharing login credentials.
Generative AI has amplified the effectiveness of these schemes by automating and personalizing attacks, while deepfakes — AI-generated audio and video that convincingly mimic real people — enable highly believable impersonations. These tools are redefining the boundaries of what’s possible in social engineering.
The Psychological Foundations of Social Engineering
To understand why social engineering works, it’s important to examine the psychological principles it exploits:
Authority and Trust: People are predisposed to comply with requests from perceived authority figures. Deepfakes take advantage of this by convincingly mimicking executives, government officials, or other trusted individuals.
Fear and Urgency: Attackers often create a sense of panic to short-circuit critical thinking. A deepfake of a company representative demanding immediate action could compel employees to bypass standard security protocols. The same sense of urgency is exploited by deepfake blackmailers.
Reciprocity: Individuals are inclined to return favors. Attackers might pose as helpful colleagues, empathic customers, or vendors to gain trust and extract sensitive information.
Familiarity: People are more likely to trust those they recognize. Deepfakes exploit this by mimicking the faces and voices of known individuals, triggering a false sense of comfort and trust.
Exploiting the Human Element
Deepfakes are effective because of the way they exploit fundamental human traits. The human brain is wired to prioritize visual and auditory cues when evaluating trustworthiness. When presented with a face or voice that appears authentic, we instinctively lower our guard. This makes deepfakes uniquely effective in social engineering.
In the instance of the 2024 social engineering attack on a Hong Kong firm, cybercriminals used AI to impersonate the company’s CFO and other trusted actors in a video conference, asking an employee to initiate a $25 million transaction. The visual authenticity of the message overrode rational skepticism, leading the individual to act without verifying the request. Deepfake audio and video calls manipulate tone, inflection, and familiarity to create a false sense of urgency or trust. These attacks succeed not because of technical ingenuity alone, but because they manipulate the deeply ingrained social behaviors humans rely on to navigate relationships.
Scaling Human Exploitation Through Technology
While generative AI enables the automation of personalized phishing messages, it is the integration with deepfakes that scales the exploitation of human psychology. Audio and video deepfakes target emotional responses — such as fear, trust, and urgency — on a visceral level. A deepfake audio call might simulate a distressed family member requesting immediate financial help, bypassing critical thinking in favor of an emotional reaction. A video deepfake could simulate an executive’s face and voice with impeccable accuracy, leaving little room for doubt. These attacks do more than deceive—they exploit our inherent trust in what we see and hear.
This psychological vulnerability is exacerbated in high-pressure situations where individuals feel compelled to act quickly, such as during a supposed crisis or urgent request from a perceived authority figure.
The fight against deepfakes and social engineering must prioritize education and awareness. Training programs should focus on teaching employees to recognize manipulation tactics, question unexpected requests, and verify the authenticity of communications. Building a culture of skepticism and critical thinking within organizations can help counteract the psychological vulnerabilities that deepfakes exploit. Simple practices, such as double-checking with a colleague or using secondary verification methods, can act as effective safeguards against manipulation.
The Role of Detection Technology
Removing the burden of manual verification and detection from the human workforce is a key step in securing companies from AI-powered social engineering tactics. At a time when even the topmost experts in AI and machine learning cannot distinguish between real media and deepfakes, workers cannot be expected to always recognize a synthetic forgery leading them into a social engineering trap.
Deepfake detection solutions remove the burden of manual verification by leveraging cutting-edge AI-powered models to identify deepfakes in real time and at scale. Reality Defender’s detection technology uses advanced multimodal analysis to identify inconsistencies and alert users to deepfakes before malicious actors can breach company defenses. The platform-agnostic nature of our tools enables easy integration into any pre-existing workflows without affecting operational efficiency. Our team of experts works closely with the client’s workforce to ensure workers know how to utilize detection technology for maximum impact.
To explore how Reality Defender can help secure your workflows against AI-powered social engineering attacks, schedule a conversation with our team.
