Vishing
Also known as Voice phishing
Social engineering carried out over a phone call, increasingly using AI-generated voice.
A common pattern targets the IT help desk directly: someone calls claiming to be an employee locked out before an important meeting, applies time pressure, and talks the technician into resetting a password or registering a new MFA device. That single call can undo an otherwise strong identity setup.
Voice cloning has made the executive variant much more convincing, since a few seconds of public audio is now enough to imitate someone. Identity verification at the help desk needs to rely on something the caller has rather than something they sound like.
Where this comes up
Vishing sits inside our cybersecurity and threats work. If you are trying to work out what this means for your own environment rather than in the abstract, that is the page worth reading next, and a short call will get you a straight answer faster than either.