Cyber-Phishing for the Soul: Don’t Click the Enemy’s Lies
While at work, I came across an article featured on Hacker News about how hackers are using PDFs to impersonate companies like Microsoft and DocuSign, among others, in callback phishing campaigns. As I read the article, I couldn’t help but make the connection with how the enemy seeks to hack the holiness of God from our lives, and instead of us being a light like a city on a hill (Matthew 5:14), we start to live a life of darkness.
By definition, a hacker is a person who illegally gains access to and sometimes tampers with information in a computer system. The enemy is the hacker of this world seeking to illegally gain access to your peace and to tamper with your intimacy, which is where you will gain insight and instruction from the kingdom of God. The enemy operates not by code like hackers but chaos. The enemy doesn’t need a keyboard—just a crack in your confidence, a moment of distraction, or a whisper of doubt. Just like a digital hacker exploits vulnerabilities in a system, this enemy targets the soft spots in your soul, aiming to corrupt your clarity, distort your identity, and reroute your purpose. But just as firewalls protect networks, your boundaries, faith, and self-awareness can shield your inner life from intrusion.
I want to share 3 ways we can overcome making the correlation between the points shared in the article and how we can take these principles and apply them in our spiritual lives as well.
An analysis of phishing emails with PDF attachments between May 5 and June 5, 2025, has revealed Microsoft and DocuSign to be the most impersonated brands. Phishing emails are fraudulent messages designed to trick recipients into revealing sensitive information, such as login credentials or financial details, by impersonating legitimate sources. In our spiritual lives we have to be on guard to the enemies phasing attacks we give the culture log in credentials to spaces that to be dedicated to God, or we give over into a fraudulent faith where we are not honest with God about the things that are truly bothering us so we show up to the altar of God impersonating as if we are okay, we show up to church impersonating as if we are okay we show up impersonating as if everything is good in community when in actuality its not good and we aren’t okay we then become the ones who hack ourselves out of the holiness that God calls us to because we refuse to honest about the things that we are experiencing.
Victims are coaxed into calling a phone number in a purported attempt to resolve an issue or confirm a transaction. During the phone call, the attacker masquerades as a legitimate customer representative and tricks the victim into either disclosing sensitive information or installing malware on their devices. We become coaxed into dialing in the calls of the culture instead of the calls of the kingdom, and culture is masking their solutions as though they are the end-all be-all to all of your problems, and you have disclosed sacred information and now have a life with malware, and wonder why there is chaos instead of calm. Our role is to use the Holy Spirit's prompting to be able to discern mask of the cultures so we can walk in the ways of the kingdom.
Attackers use direct voice communication to exploit the victim's trust in phone calls and the perception that phone communication is a secure way to interact with an organization, When I was starting to visit my church someone tried to impersonate my pastor in my inbox on Instagram, the thing was I knew my pastor aint got time to be messaging me directly sheesh he shared how he likes for directions to be printed out so I know he wasn’t messaging on Instagram. The other aspect that I recognized was that their tone of voice didn’t align with what I had been sitting under, so I knew that although they were trying to exploit my trust, I had been so use to sitting under the real voice that I couldn’t be tricked by the fake voice. We have to be so comfortable and in-depth to the voice of God and his word that when attackers seek to use direct voice and exploit you, that you are not exploitable because you know and understand the real voice of God.
In closing, its my hope that as we are being educated in our workspaces and in life to be on guard when it comes to hackers, I hope this blog will serve as a resource teaching you how to be viligant in life, work, and most importantly, your relationship with God.
