What Are the Latest Red Team Techniques Using AI for Social Engineering?

Table of Contents

• Introduction
• The Generic Phish vs. The AI-Crafted Bespoke Lure
• The Adversarial Mandate: Why Red Teams Must Use AI
• The AI-Powered Red Team Social Engineering Workflow
• Latest AI-Powered Red Team Social Engineering Techniques (2025)
• The Ethical Boundary: The Responsible Use of AI in Red Teaming
• The Future: Autonomous Social Engineering Agents
• A Blue Team's Guide: Defending Against AI-Powered Social Engineering
• Conclusion
• FAQ

Introduction

The latest Red Team techniques using AI for social engineering involve automated OSINT and target profiling, the use of Large Language Models (LLMs) to generate hyper-personalized, context-aware lures, and the deployment of real-time voice and video deepfakes to bypass human verification checks. In 2025, ethical hackers are now building integrated AI-driven campaign workflows that can simulate a sophisticated adversary's multi-channel social engineering attack with unprecedented realism and scale. This evolution is critical for accurately testing modern defenses, as it moves the practice from sending generic phishing templates to executing bespoke, AI-crafted psychological operations.

The Generic Phish vs. The AI-Crafted Bespoke Lure

A traditional red team social engineering exercise often involved using a pre-made phishing template. An operator might craft a single, generic email about a "password reset" or an "urgent HR update" and send it to a large block of employees. While this could test a baseline level of security awareness, it was often a low-effort simulation that savvy employees and modern email security filters could easily spot.

The new, state-of-the-art technique is the AI-crafted bespoke lure. An ethical hacker no longer uses a generic template. Instead, they use an AI to craft a unique, highly relevant, and personalized lure for each individual target. The AI can be instructed to scrape a target's LinkedIn profile and generate a message impersonating a former colleague from a specific company, referencing a shared skill. This level of personalization creates a much more challenging and realistic test of an organization's human and technical defenses, accurately mimicking the methods of the most advanced real-world attackers.

The Adversarial Mandate: Why Red Teams Must Use AI

The adoption of AI is no longer an optional extra for elite red teams; it is a mandatory requirement for several key reasons:

To Accurately Simulate the Adversary: As we've discussed, real-world cybercriminals and state-sponsored groups are heavily using AI to power their social engineering. To provide a valuable and realistic simulation, the red team (the "good guys") must be able to replicate these same advanced TTPs (Tactics, Techniques, and Procedures).

To Test Modern AI Defenses: A primary goal of a red team exercise is to test the effectiveness of the blue team's security tools. With the rise of AI-powered email security (ICES) platforms, a simple, generic phish will be blocked. A red team needs to use their own AI to craft lures that are sophisticated enough to test and potentially bypass the defensive AI.

To Provide Effective "Human Firewall" Training: The goal of a phishing simulation is to train employees. Using easy-to-spot, generic phishes can create a false sense of security. By using AI to create genuinely convincing and difficult lures, red teams provide a much more effective training experience that hardens the "human firewall" against real-world threats.

To Achieve Scale and Efficiency: The reconnaissance and lure-crafting phases of a social engineering engagement are traditionally the most time-consuming. AI automates these tasks, allowing a red team to conduct a more comprehensive and wide-ranging test in a fraction of the time.

The AI-Powered Red Team Social Engineering Workflow

A modern, ethical hacking engagement leveraging AI for social engineering follows a clear workflow:

1. Automated Target Discovery and OSINT: The red team leader defines the engagement's objective (e.g., "gain initial access to the finance department"). An AI-powered OSINT tool is then used to scan public sources like LinkedIn to identify the best individual targets and to build a detailed profile on each one, including their job history, connections, and interests.

2. Contextual Lure Generation: The red team operator uses an LLM as a creative partner. They might feed the target's profile into the LLM with a prompt like, "Craft a believable pretext for a spear-phishing email targeting this person, impersonating a recruiter from a major tech company and referencing their expertise in cloud security."

3. Synthetic Persona Creation: To deliver the lure, the ethical hacker uses Generative AI to create a believable "sock puppet" persona. This includes an AI-generated synthetic headshot (a photo of a person who doesn't exist) and a complete, plausible social media profile to back up the impersonation.

4. Multi-Channel Engagement and Verification Bypass: The attack is launched, often across multiple channels. If the target employee is well-trained and attempts to verify the request via a phone call, the red team operator can use a real-time AI voice clone to handle the call and provide the "verification," testing the organization's out-of-band verification processes.

Latest AI-Powered Red Team Social Engineering Techniques (2025)

These are the cutting-edge techniques that modern red teams are using to simulate advanced threats:

The Ethical Boundary: The Responsible Use of AI in Red Teaming

The immense power of these AI tools brings with it a new set of critical ethical considerations for ethical hackers. How realistic is too realistic? Using an AI voice clone of a CEO to create a sense of urgency is a powerful test, but it can also cause genuine distress to the employee being targeted. This is where the "ethical" part of ethical hacking is paramount. A professional red team engagement that uses these advanced techniques must be governed by a very strict and detailed Rules of Engagement (RoE) document that is agreed upon with the client beforehand. This document must clearly define what techniques will be used, who the targets are, and what the escalation and "de-confliction" procedures will be to ensure that the simulation does not cause undue harm or real-world business disruption.

The Future: Autonomous Social Engineering Agents

The current state-of-the-art is an AI "co-pilot" that assists a human red team operator. The clear future trajectory, however, is towards a fully autonomous social engineering agent. In this future scenario, a human operator would provide the AI agent with a high-level objective, such as, "Obtain the corporate VPN credentials of an employee in the finance department at Company X." The AI agent would then autonomously execute the entire kill chain: performing the OSINT, selecting the best target, crafting the lure, creating the persona, and conducting the conversational engagement to trick the target into giving up their credentials. This would enable a new level of continuous, automated testing of the human firewall.

A Blue Team's Guide: Defending Against AI-Powered Social Engineering

For CISOs and their defensive blue teams, understanding these red team techniques is the key to building a resilient defense:

1. Assume Your Employees Will Be Targeted with Perfect Lures: Your defense strategy must assume that the attacker's social engineering will be flawless and indistinguishable from a legitimate communication. This means you cannot rely on just training users to "spot the phish."

2. Make Your Business Processes Your Strongest Defense: The ultimate defense against a deepfake CEO asking for a wire transfer is not just technology, but a simple, unbreakable, and well-enforced business process that requires multi-person, out-of-band verification for all such transactions.

3. Fight AI with AI: Layer your defenses with modern, AI-powered security tools. An ICES platform can detect anomalies in communication patterns, and a browser isolation solution can neutralize malicious links, even if the human user is tricked into clicking them.

4. Use These Techniques in Your Own Training: Work with your red team or a third-party provider to use these same AI-powered techniques to create your own, highly realistic phishing simulations. This is the most effective way to train your "human firewall" to be resilient against modern attacks.

Conclusion

The toolkit and the very nature of ethical hacking are being fundamentally reshaped by the power of artificial intelligence. To provide true value and to accurately simulate the most advanced adversaries in 2025, it is no longer enough for red teams to be masters of just technical exploits. They must now also be masters of AI-powered psychological operations. By leveraging AI to craft bespoke lures, create synthetic identities, and even clone voices, ethical hackers are providing organizations with the most realistic and challenging test of their defenses possible. For the red team, mastering these new AI tools is essential to staying relevant. For the blue team, understanding and preparing for these techniques is critical to defending the human core of their organization.

FAQ

What is a red team?

A red team is a group of ethical hackers who simulate the tactics of real-world adversaries to test an organization's security defenses in a controlled, authorized manner.

What is social engineering?

Social engineering is a manipulation technique that uses psychological tactics to trick people into divulging sensitive information or performing a malicious action. Phishing is the most common form of social engineering.

How does AI help a red team?

AI helps a red team to automate the most time-consuming parts of a social engineering attack (reconnaissance and lure crafting) and to create much more realistic and personalized attacks at scale, providing a more effective test.

What is a "bespoke lure"?

A bespoke lure is a social engineering message (like a phishing email) that is custom-crafted and personalized for a single, specific individual, often referencing their job, colleagues, or interests to make it highly convincing.

Is it ethical for a red team to use a deepfake?

This is a major ethical consideration. It can be considered ethical only if it is done with the full, explicit, and documented consent of the client organization as part of a formal security test, and with clear rules of engagement to prevent undue harm.

What is a "sock puppet" profile?

A sock puppet is a fake online identity, such as a fake LinkedIn profile, created by a red team to be used as a persona for their social engineering campaign. AI can now generate all the components of these profiles automatically.

What is "vishing"?

Vishing, or voice phishing, is a social engineering attack conducted over the phone. Red teams now use AI voice clones to impersonate trusted individuals in their vishing simulations.

What is a "Rules of Engagement" (RoE) document?

An RoE is a critical document in any ethical hacking engagement. It is a formal agreement between the testers and the client that defines the scope, objectives, techniques, and limitations of the test to ensure it is conducted safely and ethically.

What is the "human firewall"?

This is a term used to describe an organization's employees when they are well-trained in security awareness. They can act as a defensive layer by recognizing and reporting social engineering attempts.

How can I defend against an AI-crafted phish?

Since the lure itself may be perfect, you must focus on the context. Be suspicious of any unexpected request that involves urgency, secrecy, or a deviation from normal business processes. Always verify such requests through a separate communication channel.

What is an Integrated Cloud Email Security (ICES) platform?

An ICES platform is a modern, AI-powered email security solution that can detect sophisticated, payload-less social engineering attacks (like BEC) by analyzing communication patterns and the language of the email itself.

What is a "blue team"?

The blue team is the organization's internal security team that is responsible for defending the network. During a simulation, their job is to detect and respond to the red team's attack.

What is "quishing"?

Quishing is a phishing attack that uses a QR code. An attacker might send an email or a message with a QR code that, when scanned by a user's phone, takes them to a malicious website.

Can an AI conduct a full conversation?

Yes. A red team can use an AI chatbot to handle the initial, text-based parts of a conversation with a target. This allows them to engage with many targets at once before a human operator takes over for the final stage.

What is an autonomous red team?

This is the future vision where an AI agent can conduct an entire ethical hacking exercise on its own, given a high-level objective. This is a key area of research in offensive security.

Why is LinkedIn so useful for red teams?

Because it is a massive, publicly searchable database of professionals, their job titles, their reporting structures, their work histories, and their professional networks. It is the world's most powerful OSINT tool for corporate targeting.

What does "OSINT" stand for?

OSINT stands for Open-Source Intelligence. It refers to intelligence gathered from publicly available sources.

How do I start a career in red teaming?

A career in red teaming requires a deep technical foundation in areas like networking, operating systems, and application security, as well as a creative, problem-solving mindset. Certifications like the OSCP (Offensive Security Certified Professional) are a common starting point.

Does my company need an AI-powered red team test?

If your organization has a mature security program with modern, AI-powered defenses, then yes, you need a red team that can accurately simulate the advanced adversaries that can bypass those defenses. A simple, manual pen test may no longer be a sufficient challenge.

What is the most important defense against these attacks?

The most important defense is a combination of a vigilant, well-trained workforce and a set of ironclad, non-negotiable business processes for verifying any sensitive request, particularly financial ones. Technology provides a crucial layer, but the process and the people are the ultimate failsafe.