Social Engineering On The Rise - New Unit 42 Report
Palo Alto Networks, Wednesday, July 30th, 2025
How Cybercriminals and Nation-State Actors Are Leveraging Sophisticated Social Engineering Techniques to Attack Global Organizations at Scale
Today, Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 released the 2025 Unit 42 Global Incident Response Report: Social Engineering Edition. This report explores the top initial attack vector we observed over the past year - social engineering. During this period, over a third of all Unit 42 Incident Response cases began with a social engineering tactic.
The report analyzes how attackers are exploiting trust to breach organizations, leading to business disruption and financial loss. Insights are derived from Palo Alto Networks telemetry, over 700 incident response case studies, and Unit 42 threat research.