Security | Threat Detection | Cyberattacks | DevSecOps | Compliance

With 320 million daily users on Microsoft Teams, the ability to connect with colleagues across the organization has never been more seamless… or more targeted. The shift isn’t just about where we talk; it's about how we are being attacked. Threat actors moving beyond phishing emails and are infiltrating into the trusted spaces where your employees feel safest.

Every year on March 31st, World Backup Day rolls around with a simple but important message: Backup your data. It sounds almost too basic, right? I mean we all know in our minds that we should be doing that, and in a world of AI, zero-day exploits and nation-state threats, backing up data can feel like a cybersecurity 101 task.

Researchers at Malwarebytes warn that cybercriminals are peddling stolen tax documents for as low as $4 per identity, with freshly stolen forms selling for $20 each. These documents allow threat actors to conduct refund fraud, using stolen personal information to claim victims’ tax refunds.

Researchers at SpyCloud warn that the number of stolen identity records on criminal forums rose to 65.7 billion in 2025, a 23% increase from the previous year. “Phishing, malware, third-party breaches, and combo lists feed vast volumes of identity data into the industrialized criminal ecosystem,” the researchers write. “The risk extends beyond compromise – it fuels costly attacks at scale.

A finance employee receives an email that appears to come from the CFO requesting urgent payment approval. The message references a current project, uses the correct tone, and arrives at a plausible time. However, the email wasn’t written by a colleague — it was generated by AI. And it contains a malicious link. These attacks are becoming more common as threat actors use AI to produce convincing phishing emails, automate impersonation attempts, and launch social engineering campaigns at scale.

Researchers at LayerX warn that custom fonts can fool AI web assistants into thinking phishing pages are benign, while the human user sees something completely different. “There is a structural disconnect between what an AI assistant analyzes in a page’s HTML and what a user sees rendered by the browser,” the researchers explain.

Although artificial intelligence (AI) seems relatively new to a lot of people, it was first officially created in 1956 and has been a large, improving branch of computer science ever since. The mass appeal of AI took off in late 2022 when OpenAI publicly released ChatGPTicial iintelligence (AI) seems relatively new to a lot of people, it was first officially created in 1956 and has been a large, improving branch of computer science ever since.

In the financial services industry, a "security incident" is rarely just an IT ticket. It is a regulatory event. Whether you are a bank, a global investment firm, or a fintech startup, your email environment is the most targeted entry point for attackers and the most common exit point for sensitive data.

I just came across the Zero Day Clock, and I love it. Everyone should go there, see the stats, see the trends, and figure out what that means for your ongoing and future patch management plans.

Malwarebytes warns that a phishing campaign is using Google Calendar invites to send phony renewal notices for Malwarebytes subscriptions. The calendar invites contain a phone number that will connect the user with a scammer. “The amounts in these fake invites are large and attention-grabbing, usually several hundred dollars for multiple years of service,” Malwarebytes says.

Researchers at Permiso warn that threat actors can plant phishing messages within Copilot AI summaries. Notably, the researchers found that attackers can trick Copilot into including internal information to craft a more targeted message.

AI isn’t just another technology wave—it’s a force multiplier for both innovation and risk. In a recent webinar featuring insights from Bryan Palma and guest speaker Jinan Budge, Vice President and Research Director at Forrester, one message came through clearly: the rise of AI and AI agents is fundamentally reshaping the human risk landscape—and security leaders need to move fast to keep up.

The number of publicly reported unique vulnerabilities has risen year after year. There was a brief decrease and stabilization in 2015 - 2016, but those are the only years in the over two decades (1999 - on) I have been following vulnerability metrics. Other than that, it has been up, up, up.

I need to confess something. A few days ago whilst vibe coding at 2am (which can end up burning through tokens like they are going out of fashion) I accidentally pasted my API key directly into a Claude chat instead of the terminal window I had open. Claude told me off. It felt like a full, proper, disappointed parent tone; the AI equivalent of 'I'm not angry, just disappointed', except it absolutely was angry. There may have been paragraphs.

On March 9th, Codewall.ai disclosed how it had hacked McKinsey & Company’s AI platform called Lilli, a purpose-built system for 43,000+ employees to analyze documents, chat, and access decades of proprietary research. The researchers unleashed an AI agent which quickly scanned 200 endpoints, identified 22 that did not require authentication, and one that wrote user search queries into a database including non-parameterized JSON keys which were concatenated directly into SQL.

The old rules for spotting a phishing email are changing. Remember looking for bad grammar and clumsy spelling? Thanks to AI, hackers' emails are increasingly polished and hard to spot. But a new poll from KnowBe4 reveals the modern worker's most reliable alarm bell for a cyberattack isn't a typo; it's a sense of manufactured urgency.

Digital Cleanup Day might be seen as a digital chore: delete old files, clear the inbox, reduce your carbon footprint. It’s framed as a technical exercise. But digital cleanup isn't only about your hard drive; it’s also about your mind. We are currently drowning in "Digital Toxicity" vast amounts of redundant, obsolete, and trivial data. This isn't just a storage issue. It’s a security crisis. Why? Because you cannot protect data you don’t remember you have.

I am very proud of our customer community here at KnowBe4. It is a place where customers can discuss our products amongst each other and interface with KnowBe4’s developers and product managers. Allowing customers to interface with other customers allows them to hear suggestions and solutions that people using our product have discovered and used, and if they have a problem that a fellow customer can’t answer, our team is there.

A surge in shipping-related phishing scams is targeting the Middle East and Africa (MEA) region, according to researchers at Group-IB. “To deliver the scam, the attacker sends a phishing link to victims via SMS using various spoofing or bulk-message techniques,” the researchers write. “These links are typically optimized for mobile devices, since most victims open SMS messages on their phones.

Integrated cloud email security (ICES) is a term coined by industry analyst, Gartner, in their 2021 Market Guide for Email Security. The guide was reissued in 2023 and stated that ‘by 2025, 20% of anti-phishing solutions will be delivered via API integration with the email platform, up from less than 5%” at the time of publication’.

Anyone who knows me knows I’m passionate about mindfulness. Because I genuinely believe it makes us better humans. But also, because I have one of those brains that desperately needs it. I’m easily distracted and I start new ideas before finishing old ones. My attention can scatter in a hundred directions. I wrote before how I clicked on a phishing test because I was multitasking and running on autopilot. And that moment really changed the direction of my career and my research.

As I was writing my latest book, How AI and Quantum Impact Cyber Threats and Defenses, I was hit by how many theoretical and real attacks there are involving AI. There are attacks committed by AI and attacks committed agsinst AI, and I’m not sure which category is bigger.

Sending an unsecured email can be likened to writing sensitive information on a sticky note and leaving it on someone else's desk: anybody can intercept and share that information. Fortunately, there are ways to ensure your emails are safe from the prying eyes of hackers through encryption, meaning your message — no matter how sensitive — is seen only by the intended recipient.

When we think about misdirected email, we often put ourselves in the shoes of the sender. After all, nobody wants to tell their manager that they might (however accidentally) be responsible for a data breach. But what you do when you’re on the other side of the inbox?

Traditionally, email data loss prevention software has used static rules to stop users from emailing sensitive or confidential data. Specifically, email DLP protects organizations from accidentally exposing sensitive data such as bank account numbers, passwords, credit card numbers, intellectual property, or trade secrets.

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) has issued an advisory warning of a phishing campaign that’s impersonating city and county officials to send phony requests for permit fees. “Individuals and businesses with active applications for land-use permits are being targeted by criminals impersonating city and county planning and zoning board officials, fraudulently requesting fees associated with these permits,” the FBI says.

Sending an unsecured email can be likened to writing sensitive information on a sticky note and leaving it on someone else's desk: anybody can intercept and share that information. Fortunately, there are ways to ensure your emails are safe from the prying eyes of hackers through encryption, meaning your message — no matter how sensitive — is seen only by the intended recipient.

The number of ransomware attacks increased by 50% in 2025, even though the number of victims who decided to pay the ransom fell to an all-time low, according to a new report from Chainalysis. The size of the ransom for victims who did pay increased significantly, growing 368% year-over-year to nearly $60,000. The total ransom payments observed by Chainalysis last year amounted to $820 million.

Security awareness programs are built on measurement. Before you can reduce human risk, you need a clear understanding of where knowledge gaps exist across your workforce. For many organizations, that process starts with a baseline assessment. For years, KnowBe4’s Security Awareness Proficiency Assessment (SAPA) has provided that foundation.

Long-time followers of mine know that I am not an AI hype person. Some people might even call me an AI critic. I prefer to call myself an AI realist. I do not think AI will kill us all (despite our best efforts to bypass all guardrails and common sense). I do not think AI will replace all jobs. I do not think AI will replace all cybersecurity jobs. But I do think AI allows improvements in many areas, including cyber defenses, over traditional tools and techniques.

More than 90% of successful cyberattacks start with email, according to the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). That’s not because security teams lack tools, but because attackers target human decision-making. For years, organizations treated email security as a filtering problem: block enough malicious messages, and risk goes down. That assumption no longer holds.

As I wrote in my recent book, How AI and Quantum Impacts Cyber Threats and Defenses, as we humans use AI more and more, AI will begin to communicate with itself using new AI-only communication methods that humans cannot easily see or read. If there is no human-readable audit trail or code, this is a very, very bad thing. It must be stopped at all costs. Humans are absolutely beginning to use AI more and more to do things they used to do manually. Soon, we will all be using multiple AI agents.

OSINT stands for open-source intelligence. It is the collection, analysis, and dissemination of information from publicly available sources, such as social media, government reports, newspapers, and other public documents. OSINT is commonly used by intelligence agencies, private investigators, and law enforcement to gather information about an individual or organization. The OSINT framework showcases the multiple ways in which organizations can gather intelligence.

Most data breaches don’t happen because systems fail. They happen because people make routine errors. Attackers know this, which is why social engineering has become the dominant attack vector, exploiting everyday actions like emailing files or responding to messages. Today, 70–90% of successful cyber attacks involve social engineering, resulting in data exposure that technical safeguards can’t intercept.

Fake calendar invites have been a problem on Gmail for years. Even though they could appear on other calendar services, I hadn’t seen or read about a lot of it. Gmail had been taking the brunt of the fake calendar invites. However, I got a scam Microsoft Outlook calendar invite recently, and other Outlook users are complaining more as well. So, what was previously happening mostly in Gmail has now moved over to Outlook, too. I am a busy guy.

Email attacks have become one of the key ways for hackers to target organizations and individuals. The sheer number of tools available has made it easier than ever for non-technical cybercriminals to launch sophisticated cyber attacks. As a result, many resources are available for each stage of the kill chain – from reconnaissance to delivery to weaponization. This article focuses on the second stage of the cyber kill chain – weaponization.

The U.S. public sector faces unique challenges as it is tasked with safeguarding the most sensitive data of citizens, all while maintaining the critical infrastructure that keeps society functioning. Unfortunately, government and educational institutions are no longer just peripheral targets, they are on the frontline of cyberattacks.

Spear phishing is on the rise in the US and is quickly becoming the biggest cybersecurity threat for businesses. With more sophisticated, human-like emails and a greater reliance on email communication in general, it can be difficult to spot a standard phishing attack, let alone a spear phishing one.

Messaging platforms are now a major vector for phishing and other social engineering attacks, according to a new report from NCC Group’s Fox-IT. The researchers warn that legitimate messaging apps such as WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Signal, LinkedIn, and Gmail-integrated messaging serve as avenues through which attackers can target users while evading email security filters.

Email-based threats are evolving faster than traditional solutions can keep up. According to Verizon’s 2025 Data Breach Investigations Report, the use of synthetically generated text in malicious emails has doubled over the past two years. That makes it far more difficult to spot social engineering attacks like phishing, which trick users with deceptive messages.

It is tax season in the United States and that means plenty of tax scams. I recently received these SMS messages. I am a TurboTax user, so hey, these might be legit, even though they look scammy. I first looked up the ttax.us domain using GoDaddy’s Whois service. The ttax.us domain is not valid. Fact is, scammers would not have sent out a scam message using a non-existent domain, so it probably means that it was taken down. Well, that’s good!

Phishing isn’t just increasing. It’s outpacing the way many organizations test for it. Attacks have surged 400% year over year, and corporate users are now more likely to be targeted by phishing than by malware. As social engineering becomes a primary entry point into enterprise environments, how you assess phishing risk matters just as much as how often you train for it.

Our increasing dependence on the internet and, specifically, email for business and personal communication has produced the perfect environment for cybercriminals to launch phishing attacks. As organization’s technical controls have advanced, cybercriminals have evolved their attacks, making them more difficult for traditional email security solutions that use signature-based detection (such as Microsoft and secure email gateways (SEGs) to detect.

Sending a work email to the wrong person – it’s something all of us have done at least once in our working lives. For some people, it’s a regular occurrence. But just how risky is it? Thinking back over your recent emails, you can probably pick out the ones that would have been worse to misdirect than others. In the best case it’s a non-issue or only slightly embarrassing.

For legal organizations, the integrity of communication isn't just a business requirement, it’s a foundational pillar of the profession. Whether it’s a sensitive case strategy, a confidential merger agreement, or personal client data, the information contained within firm emails represents an immense amount of trust and significant liability. However, as law firms increasingly migrate to cloud environments like Microsoft 365, they face a double-edged sword.