Why Social Engineering Works: The Adversary Economics Behind the Attack
Doppel, Friday, July 17th, 2026
Social engineering persists because it is an economically rational attack model, with AI cutting production costs while payoffs stay high.
Social engineering thrives not because of exceptional attacker sophistication or employee negligence but because it is the most cost-effective infiltration method.
As organizations hardened technical defenses over two decades, threat actors shifted toward exploiting human trust, the unpriced surface.
AI accelerated this by cutting production costs roughly 95 percent, letting attackers generate convincing, personalized lures at scale in seconds.
Conversational payloads further raise success rates while evading detection, even as defenders face rising costs from fragmented alerts and incident response.
The piece concludes that awareness training alone cannot counter industrialized deception and recommends disrupting attacker infrastructure before campaigns launch.