Resources | Entersekt

South African fraud surge runs on trust, not hacking

Written by Cara Visser | May 29, 2026 10:03:50 AM

As AI systems grow more capable, criminals are using them to deliver increasingly sophisticated scams. Yet even as attacks on systems grow in scope and frequency, the exploitation of human trust through social engineering remains the most common entry point to full system infiltration.

“The most common attacks we see are social engineering attempts leveraging AI to coerce users into approving legacy authentication,” said Janike Stiglingh, director of product marketing at Entersekt. An attacker might use a social engineering scam to harvest a user’s login credentials, exploit a known software misconfiguration in a secondary system and finally elevate their privileges.

Read more