Social Engineering at Machine Speed
Eva Benn
BSides Seattle 2026 · Day 1 · Keynote
This talk traces the evolution of social engineering from Kevin Mitnick's analog-era phone pretexting through to the current AI-driven landscape where autonomous agents can execute full-chain social engineering campaigns at machine speed. The speaker argues that 2023 marked a turning point when generative AI collapsed the skill barrier, and 2026 is collapsing the human operator barrier entirely -- meaning social engineering no longer requires a skilled human at the controls.
AI review
An awareness-level survey of how generative AI is reshaping social engineering, covering prompt injection, agent-to-agent manipulation on Moldbook, and AI companion risks. While the framing of three new vectors is useful, the talk lacks original research, live exploitation, or novel technical contributions -- it curates and contextualizes other people's work (Zenity, Striker, Arcanum) without adding measurable depth.