Your Niece Can Now Launch a 'Sophisticated' Cyberattack

Voice Phishing Attack, As Executed By Your Niece

Here’s how your niece, let’s call her Mary, actually executes these attacks in practice:

Mary doesn’t start by looking for a vulnerability in the traditional sense — the vulnerability is the human. She starts with an employee, someone whose name, role, and rough responsibilities are easy to piece together from LinkedIn, job postings, and basic company information. Basic internet fluency.

From there, Mary doesn’t craft an attack so much as assemble one. An AI-generated script fills in the gaps: the right tone, the right urgency, internal phrasing that sounds familiar enough to pass. The scenario is mundane by design — a broken phone, an Okta lockout, an executive who needs access restored, and FAST. It doesn’t need to be perfect. It just needs to sound routine.

Then, she makes the call.

There are no links to click and no suspicious emails to flag. Just a voice on the line. Caller ID spoofing makes the number look internal. Confidence carries the rest. The helpdesk agent does what they’re trained to do (and is in their title): help a colleague get back to work.

While that conversation unfolds, the real work happens quietly in parallel. A widely available phishing proxy sits between the employee and the legitimate SSO page. As the employee enters credentials and approves MFA, guided step by step over the phone ,session tokens are captured in real time. The authentication succeeds. MFA is technically “passed.” From the system’s perspective, nothing looks wrong.

From the attacker’s perspective, access is now persistent. And at no point did your niece “break” MFA, she simply walked through it.

As these campaigns expand, they increasingly resemble an industrialized workflow:

• Target reconnaissance
• Social Engineered vishing made fast and easy with AI
• Proxy tooling to intercept authentication
• Access abuse to reach sensitive systems
• Extortion as the monetization layer

It is a supply chain — one that scales because the tools scale.

AI Accelerates the Collapse of the Skill Floor

AI didn’t create this class of attack, and it didn’t even fundamentally change the tactic. What it did was make something obvious that many security teams ignore: the success of these intrusions has very little to do with attacker skill, and almost everything to do with how identity systems are designed to be used.

This is why talking about a “lowered barrier to entry” only tells part of the story. The more important shift is that the attack no longer depends on individual capability at all. It depends on access to operationalized workflows. The fragile parts of the attack (the parts defenders assumed were hard) have been replaced with tooling.

As a result, these campaigns now look less like hacking and more like manufacturing. Trust is initiated through conversation. Authentication is intercepted through proxy tooling. MFA isn’t broken; it’s satisfied. Access isn’t escalated; it’s abused exactly as designed. Extortion follows. Each step is modular, repeatable, and easily handed off. Scale comes not from better attackers, but from better processes. This is why groups can run the same campaign across dozens or hundreds of organizations simultaneously.

Most organizations responded to phishing by hardening login. Attackers simply moved laterally across the identity lifecycle,to recovery, helpdesk, enrollment, and factor changes,where controls were weaker and trust assumptions were higher. The result is a diagnostic map of where identity systems still assume that successful authentication equals legitimate access.

As long as identity workflows are built around shared secrets, interceptable flows, and human trust at the moments that matter most, these attacks will remain viable.

What This Means for Enterprise Defense

When teenagers like your niece Mary can cause enterprise-scale disruption by executing a workflow, that’s not a threat intelligence problem. It’s an identity architecture problem.

The organizations that stop these attacks aren’t the ones adding more training on social engineering or longer helpdesk scripts. They’re the ones removing entire classes of failure.

Phishing-resistant authentication eliminates the ability to proxy sessions. FIDO2 Passkeys remove shared secrets entirely. Strong identity verification at recovery and high-risk moments ensures that “valid access” actually means legitimate access.

Until then, we’ll keep calling the attacks and methods sophisticated, while ignoring how easy the attacks have become.

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