ok so this is something that took me way too long to notice.

most social engineering doesn’t actually work because someone is dumb or careless. that’s the story we tell after. but when you really look at it… that’s not what’s happening.

it works because nobody owns the whole thing.

security owns policy. support owns speed. sales owns the relationship. ops owns keeping things moving.

everyone is doing their job. like genuinely. following rules. hitting KPIs. not being reckless.

and that’s exactly where it breaks.

because the attacker isn’t trying to fool a person. they’re just walking the seams. the little handoffs where one team assumes another team already checked. where verification quietly turns into trust.

and when you do a postmortem it’s always weirdly clean.

no policy violation. no training ignored. no obvious red flag. just… an outcome nobody intended.

the uncomfortable part is this: most orgs are actually pretty secure inside roles. but between roles? it’s vibes. assumptions. “they probably handled that.”

you can literally see these gaps from the outside. the tone of support replies. how fast escalations happen. what the UI lets you retry. what exceptions exist “just this once.”

that’s not a people problem. that’s an ownership problem.

so yeah, when people say “train users better” it kind of misses the point.

the real question is: where does responsibility fade out in your system?

because wherever that is… that’s where social engineering lives.