How to Use social engineering in a Sentence

social engineering

noun
  • There are two ways to pull off this social engineering trick, Mack told me.
    — Robert Hackett, Fortune, 9 June 2018
  • The past 20 years prove that large-scale social engineering does not work.
    — Sean P. Brooks, Orlando Sentinel, 14 Feb. 2025
  • This data can be used for scams or social engineering attacks.
    — Kurt Knutsson, FOXNews.com, 14 Nov. 2025
  • The attacker needed weeks of social engineering and rare zero-days to get one shot at us.
    — Philip Martin, Fortune, 29 May 2026
  • Finally, be aware of how phishing and social engineering attacks work and how to guard against them.
    — Jim Salter, Ars Technica, 14 Sep. 2020
  • This type of ‘hack’ generally known as social engineering relies on con artistry rather than code.
    — David Z. Morris, Fortune, 18 Mar. 2020
  • So far, the most common use of AI for hacking has been social engineering.
    — Los Angeles Times, 5 Mar. 2026
  • Keeping the public in tallying mode is a low form of social engineering.
    — Armond White, National Review, 14 Sep. 2022
  • There are also more nebulous items, such as advice to beware of social engineering and watch out for spam.
    — PCMAG, 22 Jan. 2025
  • Nearly all secure platforms can be overcome by some form of social engineering.
    — Kevin Purdy, Ars Technica, 19 Feb. 2025
  • What’s more, those accounts can also be used to leverage social engineering attacks.
    — Davey Winder, Forbes.com, 4 May 2025
  • This way, the attack doesn't need to rely on trickery and social engineering to infect victims.
    — Lily Hay Newman, WIRED, 30 Mar. 2018
  • Social media fraud is part of an ecosystem of online crime that relies on social engineering and trust between users.
    — WIRED, 26 July 2023
  • That’s one reason tax expenditures aimed at social engineering should be on the chopping block.
    — Veronique De Rugy, Orange County Register, 18 July 2024
  • These attacks start with social engineering.
    — Kurt Knutsson, FOXNews.com, 5 Dec. 2025
  • Many threats are levied against the front line, from social engineering to technical means, and these threats are often the first domino to fall in a sequence of events.
    — Emil Sayegh, Forbes, 3 Oct. 2022
  • For all that realism, though, Marrs pins his plot on a government eager to do some social engineering.
    — Alex Davies, WIRED, 27 Aug. 2019
  • Ariely, for his part, predicted that nudges were just the beginning, and held out for more ambitious social engineering.
    — Gideon Lewis-Kraus, The New Yorker, 30 Sep. 2023
  • Most ransomware root causes lie in human error, with social engineering and phishing.
    — Christian Espinosa, Forbes.com, 23 Feb. 2026
  • This could become a valuable tool for when hackers steal data from victims or try to perfect their social engineering attacks.
    — Michael Kan, PCMAG, 26 Jan. 2024
  • In the world of cybercrime and hacking, this is in the category called social engineering.
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 5 Nov. 2021
  • So, social engineering is a favorite tactic.
    — Kurt Knutsson, FOXNews.com, 13 Aug. 2025
  • Email hacks are among the most prevalent types of social engineering methods used by cybercriminals.
    — Perry Carpenter, Forbes, 8 Oct. 2021
  • Criminals are using the same social engineering techniques that have proven effective in email scams.
    — Ken Colburn, The Arizona Republic, 17 Aug. 2021
  • The common thread in each case is social engineering, and this calls for layered verification.
    — Brian Greenberg, Forbes.com, 25 Aug. 2025
  • School busing in Boston is a case study on how not to conduct grand experiments in social engineering.
    — Kevin Cullen, BostonGlobe.com, 1 July 2019
  • While the Twitter hack garnered major headlines, the social engineering attack at the heart of it is nothing new.
    — Brian Barrett, Wired, 31 July 2020
  • In this case bigotry, social engineering, a real-life tragedy and the politics of black women's hair are just some of the subjects showcased in the films.
    — Bill Goodykoontz, azcentral, 30 Jan. 2020
  • The ban is all that more unusual given Hadnagy’s social engineering village drew crowds.
    — Christiaan Hetzner, Fortune, 19 Aug. 2022
  • No more funding for Green New Deal social engineering policies.
    — Thomas G. Moukawsher, Newsweek, 30 Jan. 2025

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'social engineering.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: