Anything's possible, but the simplest explanation (per Occam's razor) is just that the employee was fooled. Is it plausible that if a good social engineer cold

Anything's possible, but the simplest explanation (per Occam's razor) is just that the employee was fooled. Is it plausible that if a good social engineer cold-called a bunch of employees, they'd eventually get one to reveal some info? Yes, it happens quite frequently. So any suggestion that it was an inside job, or used deep fakes, or something like that would require additional evidence. Kevin Mitnick's "The Art of Deception" covers this extensively. The first few calls to employees wouldn't be attempts to actually get the secret info, it'd be to get inside lingo so that future calls would sound like they were from the inside. For example, the article says the caller was familiar with the floor plan of the office. The first call might be something like "Hey, I'm a new employee. Where are the IT staff, are they on our floor?" - they might learn "What do you mean, everyone's on the 2nd floor, we don't have any other floors. IT are on the other side of the elevators from us." They hang up, and now with their next call they can pretend to be someone from IT and say something about the floor plan to sound more convincing.