The Trust Trap: How Abnormal Stops Social Engineering at Work

Social engineers have adapted to the rhythms of the modern workplace. Using generative AI and automation, attackers now craft and deploy thousands of convincing messages with little effort, mimicking internal communication styles and exploiting how employees behave—not just what they click.

Human error plays a role in over 60% of successful breaches, and the impact is costly. In 2024 alone, phishing cost organizations an average of $4.88 million per breach, while business email compromise (BEC) attacks accounted for $2.8 billion in losses.

Today’s attackers don’t just target technology—they exploit behavior. This is why legacy tools like SEGs often fall short. The most dangerous attacks aren’t always detectable through static entry-point indicators. They succeed because they look familiar and prey on expectations of the 21st-century workplace.

At Abnormal, we believe that behavioral context is the missing link. That’s why our AI models learn the unique patterns of communication within your organization and flag the subtle signs of deception others miss. Below, we unpack five core workplace behaviors attackers leverage—and how Abnormal addresses them to reduce risk, increase efficiency, and cut response costs.

Respond fast > Respond smart

Speed is a virtue in many workplace cultures. But that same sense of urgency is what attackers rely on when crafting fraudulent emails. Whether it’s a last-minute invoice or a wire transfer that “must be approved today,” urgency often bypasses adequate risk assessment.

How Abnormal Helps: Our Inbound Email Security product builds a behavioral baseline for each employee using thousands of signals—including identity, content, tone, and context—to determine what their typical communication looks like. If a message includes unexpected financial urgency from an unusual sender or uses atypical language, it’s flagged and isolated before it can cause harm.

Outcome: Detects and stops anomalous messages that use urgency to force high-risk actions—protecting employees from socially-engineered requests that fall outside normal communication patterns.

If the CEO asks, I do it.

Corporate hierarchy is another tool in the phisher’s toolkit. In general, employees are less likely to scrutinize requests that appear to come from senior leaders. Fear of delay and insubordination leads to automatic compliance, no matter how phishy the email.

How Abnormal Helps: Our Inbound Email Security also analyzes any email that appears to come from a high-level stakeholder but doesn’t match their typical communication style or timing. By understanding how executives usually communicate—when they send messages, how they phrase requests, and who they engage with—Abnormal can detect subtle anomalies and remove the risk before the employee has to decide whether to trust the message.

Going above and beyond, our AI Phishing Coach also reduces the risk of the deference trap by delivering fully customized phishing prevention training tailored to every employee. By leveraging real, foiled attacks for powerful simulations and 1:1 coaching sessions, Abnormal replaces one-size-fits-all training, turning employees into anti-phishing experts while reducing operational burdens.

Outcome: Stops executive impersonation attempts before they reach employees, while reinforcing awareness through tailored, real-world training.

Too many vendors, too little scrutiny.

Modern companies interact with hundreds, even thousands, of third-party vendors, from SaaS tools to service providers. Amid so much daily vendor noise, employees are conditioned to trust unfamiliar names, opening the door for attackers to impersonate partners and blend in.

How Abnormal Helps: An added feature of Inbound Email Security, VendorBase™, is a global, federated database that builds and continuously updates a behavioral model of every vendor your organization interacts with. Abnormal tracks historical communication patterns, such as typical senders, domains, formatting, tone, and financial workflows, to establish a baseline for what’s normal.

When a vendor message deviates from that baseline—whether it’s a new sender, a changed bank account, or an unfamiliar attachment—our solution flags or blocks it automatically. This removes the burden from employees to manually verify every vendor request and gives security teams visibility into potential supply chain threats.

Outcome: Reduces the risk of vendor fraud by identifying abnormal messages before they reach employees, without adding friction to trusted workflows.

Same login, new attack surface.

When an attacker gains access to a corporate email account, the inbox is just the beginning. That account likely connects to dozens of SaaS apps, collaboration tools, and shared environments, giving attackers a direct line to impersonate users, exfiltrate data, and expand access without triggering alerts.

Whether through credential phishing or brute-force attacks, account compromise has become a preferred method for attackers to operate from inside the organization.

How Abnormal Helps: Our Email Account Takeover Protection product continuously monitors for signs that a user’s email account has been compromised. It correlates login activity, device and location signals, and historical communication patterns to detect when a user’s behavior deviates from their normal usage patterns. If a compromise is confirmed, Abnormal can automatically revoke access, terminate active sessions, and initiate a password reset before attackers can do further damage.

SaaS Account Takeover Protection extends that same behavioral analysis to connected cloud applications like Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace. Abnormal builds a baseline of typical behavior across platforms—what apps a user accesses, when, from where, and how—and flags unusual access patterns or privilege escalations.

Outcome: Detects and remediates account compromise across email and SaaS environments, stopping attackers from moving laterally or impersonating users inside your cloud stack.

Too many emails, too little time.

Phishers often target times when teams are most overloaded or fatigued—early mornings, Friday afternoons—to strike. The hope is that the target pays less attention to email security protocols, triage alerts, and mentally checks out after a long week of looking at an inbox full of benign emails. This can make the workforce especially vulnerable to social engineering that preys on attention lapses.

How Abnormal Helps: By filtering out graymail and bulk noise, Abnormal allows employees to spend less time triaging messages and more time on focused work. While graymail filtering may seem like a secondary feature in the broader workflow picture, teams that embrace Abnormal’s AI-powered Email Productivity tell us they could never go back to inboxes cluttered with messages that drain attention without delivering value.

Outcome: Improves focus, reduces email fatigue, and helps organizations reclaim hours of lost productivity.

AI-powered social engineering is no longer just a technical problem—it’s a cultural one. As long as attackers exploit how employees communicate, collaborate, and make decisions, email security must evolve to understand people, not just payloads.

Abnormal AI delivers exactly that. By modeling behavior across your organization, we stop the attacks that weaponize trust before they ever reach an employee.

Ready to secure your workplace culture? See how Abnormal’s behavioral AI catches what legacy tools like SEGs miss. Request a demo today.