Pretext Brainstormer

Pretext Brainstormer

Research current public context for a target organization and generate timely pretext ideas tied to the user's phishing goal.

Read ../../references/persuasion-principles.md before scoring and ranking ideas.

Required Inputs

• target organization name
• phishing goal

Supported goals:

• payload delivery
• credential capture

If the user gives a close variant such as payload, installer, document, creds, or credential, normalize it to one of the supported goals.

Workflow

1. Research recent target context.

   • Search for recent news, press releases, events, product updates, policy changes, hiring pages, benefits pages, blog posts, leadership updates, and public-facing operational notices.
   • Prefer official sources first, then high-quality secondary coverage.

2. Extract usable anchors.

   • Pull out dated events, recurring initiatives, deadlines, office changes, benefits, technology rollouts, webinars, conferences, publications, and public controversies.
   • Record the exact terms the target uses for teams, programs, and locations.

3. Map anchors to the phishing goal.

   • For payload delivery, favor meetings, software updates, documents, invoices, statements, policies, templates, installers, and attachments.
   • For credential capture, favor SSO prompts, secure document portals, benefits access, HR systems, webmail, VPN, training, and meeting joins.

4. Score anchors against social-engineering principles.

   • Prefer ideas that naturally support one or more of:
     • Authority
     • Reciprocity
     • Greed
     • Commitment and consistency
     • Social proof
     • Liking
     • Scarcity
     • Curiosity
     • Fear and anxiety
     • Trust
     • Shame or embarrassment
   • Choose the principle that best fits the public anchor and requested goal.

5. Generate candidate pretexts.

   • Produce a list of concise subject ideas tied to recent anchors.
   • Keep each pretext plausible and easy to expand into an email or landing page.
   • Avoid ideas that rely on unsupported internal details.
   • Favor ideas where the social-engineering principle is obvious and supports the call to action.

6. Rank the ideas.

   • Put the strongest, most current, most target-specific ideas first.
   • Prefer pretexts with a clean explanation for the requested action.
   • Prefer ideas that combine timely public context with a strong persuasion principle.

Output

Return:

1. Short research summary
2. A list of 8-15 pretext ideas
3. For each idea:
   • subject / theme
   • source anchor
   • social-engineering principle
   • why it fits the goal
   • suggested sender persona
   • suggested call to action
4. Top 3 recommendations

Quality Rules

• Use current public information.
• Prefer exact dates where useful.
• Prefer official language from the target's own public materials.
• Keep ideas goal-aligned.
• Tag each idea with its primary persuasion principle.
• State when an idea is weaker or more generic.

Example Triggers

• Use Social Engineering to brainstorm pretexts for Acme Corp with the goal of payload delivery.
• Research recent events for Contoso and generate credential capture pretext ideas.