During an incident, the most valuable intel is from people on the ground. Security teams rely on their colleagues across the organization to report issues quickly and without trying to fix things themselves.

91% of Americans have been targeted by a scam, and 17% have fallen victim to one, according to a new survey by Consumer Reports. Notably, 20% of respondents said the latest scam they encountered was personalized, indicating that attackers are increasingly using automation and public or leaked information to craft targeted phishing attacks.

Researchers at ReliaQuest have observed a surge in voice phishing (vishing) and Microsoft Teams phishing over the past several months, particularly from extortion groups like ShinyHunters.

Ransomware attacks involving data theft have surged by 275% in 2026, according to a new report from Zscaler. Attackers exfiltrated more than 896.2 terabytes of data from victim organizations, more than seven times the amount stolen during the 2023–2024 reporting period.

Somewhere in your security and compliance stack, there are records that prove your employees completed their security awareness training. But when these records need to serve as evidence, would they actually hold up to scrutiny?

Researchers at Fortra are tracking a new variant of calendar phishing in which threat actors trick employees into sharing meeting links internally.

The attackers pose as prospective customers and contact non-sales employees, asking to be directed to a sales representative in order to discuss a business opportunity. The attacker then sends the employee a meeting link to forward to a sales contact.

At any given moment, there’s an employee somewhere in the world tuning out of a phishing training module that was translated from another language. Every word is rendered correctly, yet the learner still stops paying attention.

In these situations, the translation often gets the blame for not engaging the learner, but the real culprit is design. When training isn’t made for international consumption in the first place, the module is set up for failure regardless of what happens when it reaches the translator.

Attackers are continually finding new ways to refine business email compromise (BEC) attacks, according to Douglas McKee, Director of Vulnerability Intelligence at Rapid7.

When attackers compromise trusted tools and accounts, they can manipulate victims’ view of reality. One way attackers can achieve this is through what McKee calls “calendar warfare,” in which attackers use calendar meetings to trick users into falling for attacks.

Spies have always relied on technology, disguises, secret communications and clever gadgets, at least if the movies are to be believed.

But some of the most effective tools in the espionage business have always been people. Convince the right person to open a door, reveal a secret or trust someone they should not, and suddenly bypassing the sophisticated security system becomes unnecessary.

Quantum Readiness Day on September 24 is a useful reminder that the security work we do today is not only about preventing breaches tomorrow. It is about protecting data and digital trust for years to come.

AI tools are drastically improving the speed of the reconnaissance stage of targeted social engineering attacks, according to researchers at ESET. Attackers can use these tools to trawl the internet for publicly available information about potential victims, and incorporate this information into personalized spear phishing attacks.

Attackers have used a new phishing platform called “BigBear 2.0” to target hundreds of organizations across more than forty countries, according to researchers at CloudSEK. In about 10% of cases, the phishing attacks were able to bypass multifactor authentication.

Researchers at Gen Digital are tracking a sophisticated social engineering campaign that’s using phony NDA documents to trick employees into moving the conversation to WhatsApp and personal email accounts. The attackers targeted an employee at Gen itself, but the employee recognized that it was a scam and played along to see what the attackers would do.

Threat actors are increasingly leveraging AI hallucinations to plant phishing links and other malicious content in AI output, IEEE Spectrum reports. Large language models (LLMs) sometimes fabricate information, including web domains, when answering users’ questions. Attackers are registering these hallucinated web domains to host phishing pages.

Researchers at INKY observed a major phishing campaign that used SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) image files to deliver malicious JavaScript. While abuse of SVG files isn’t new, INKY says their use in phishing campaigns has exploded over the past year.

With inboxes increasingly well guarded, cybercriminals are turning to a more vulnerable front in their attacks against your digital workforce.

Quantum Readiness Day on 24 September is a useful reminder that the security work we do today is not only about preventing breaches tomorrow. It is about protecting data and digital trust for years to come.

Researchers at Zimperium are tracking widespread phishing campaigns that use Browser-in-the-Browser (BitB) attacks to trick users into handing over their enterprise credentials. The attackers impersonate real HR employees at major companies and target job seekers with extremely realistic interview processes.