Topic starter
21/10/2026 7:00 pm
TL;DR: Social engineering now targets both humans and AI agents, expanding the trust boundary beyond classic phishing awareness, according to Doppel. Identity checks and intent checks need to happen earlier in the workflow before agents turn manipulation into action.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Doppel: “Building a Social Engineering Defense Platform to Protect Both Humans and AI Agents”.
Key questions
Q: Why do AI copilots and agents increase social engineering risk in enterprise workflows?
A: They compress trust into a faster decision path.
Q: What are the signs that an AI-assisted social engineering campaign is becoming dangerous?
A: Warning signs include prolonged back and forth contact, highly tailored references to a person’s hobbies or professional life, and a gradual shift from casual conversation to requests for information or action.
Q: How should security teams stop AI-powered social engineering from leading to privileged access?
A: Security teams should harden the approval path, not just the inbox.
Practitioner guidance
- Harden support-channel identity verification Require strong verification before any support interaction can trigger reset, escalation, or data-release actions, especially when an AI agent is involved in the conversation.
- Treat LLM-facing surfaces as a phishing domain Scan search, summarisation, and content-generation inputs for impersonation, malicious links, and credential-lure language, then block or warn before those surfaces are consumed by users or agents.
- Add pre-action controls for low-latency agents Insert policy checks before an assistant agent can process email, forward messages, or invoke downstream actions that may create fraud or credential-theft exposure.
Bottom line: Social engineering now targets both humans and AI agents, so the trust boundary has expanded beyond classic phishing awareness.
Glossary terms: Agent-Directed Social Engineering, Trust Surface, Content Layer Poisoning, Low-Latency Assistant Risk
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This topic was modified 3 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
23/10/2026 12:48 am
Social engineering has become a cross-identity control problem, not a human awareness problem. The article shows that the manipulative objective stays the same whether the target is a person or an agent: induce trust and trigger action. That means awareness training alone cannot carry the programme, because machine-driven workflows can be manipulated without human hesitation ever entering the loop. Practitioners should treat social engineering as an identity governance issue across human and non-human actors.
A few things that frame the scale:
- Only 44% of organisations have implemented any policies to manage their AI agents, despite 92% agreeing that governing AI agents is critical to enterprise security, according to the 2026 Infrastructure Identity Survey.
- Gartner predicts that more than 50% of successful cyberattacks against AI agents through 2029 will exploit access control weaknesses.
A question worth separating out:
Q: What should teams do when an agent can act faster than human review?
A: Move the control point earlier. If the assistant can read and act before review completes, enforce filtering, approval, and logging before the agent sees the message or reaches the action stage, because post-delivery review will be too late to stop the impact.
👉 Read our full editorial: Social engineering defense must now cover humans and agents
This post was modified 3 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group