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Topic

Security Awareness Guidance

Set of user-focused best practices—like checking links and verifying signatures—meant to help people recognize phishing and other social-engineering attacks.

Current stories

investOne report1 publisher

Security pros rate their firms secure even where MFA stays optional, Yubico and Okta find

Yubico and Okta's survey of 1,890 tech and security professionals found 23% work where multifactor login is not required on every application. With 88% still rating their company secure, at least one respondent in nine gave both answers.

Publishers:fortune.com

Reality

Evidence45
Adoption55
Hype gap+15
Incentives75
Confidence50
securityOne report1 publisher

Hoxhunt's expanded Respond automates triage of mostly benign employee phishing reports

Hoxhunt says its expanded Respond platform cuts phishing tickets needing analyst attention by up to 99%. Every figure in the release comes from the vendor, so a SOC weighing automated removal across inboxes has to test the classifier before switching it on.

Reality

Evidence25
Adoption30
Hype gap+45
Incentives85
Confidence35
securityOne report1 publisher

SecurityWeek argues for in-call deepfake detection with help desk breaches it never ties to AI

SecurityWeek says awareness training has failed against help desk vishing, citing attacks that cost MGM an estimated $100 million. The fix it profiles is Netarx's live-call scanner for cloned voices and spoofed devices, but in both breaches it cites, callers talked help desk staff into granting access.

Publishers:securityweek.com

Reality

Evidence35
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+45
Incentives
Not scored
Confidence55
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Homoglyph links break the URL check most phishing training teaches

ESET's Jake Moore says a person can inspect a link exactly as they were taught and still be fooled, because one Cyrillic character renders as the Latin one.

Publishers:theguardian.com

Reality

Evidence52
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+8
Incentives58
Confidence60
securityOne report1 publisher

Surfshark's agreeable bot personas evaded detection 62% of the time

The company showed 1,722 people a mix of human and AI-written comments in a simulated feed. The accounts they caught most reliably were the hostile ones that awareness training already teaches staff to distrust.

Reality

Evidence38
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+22
Incentives72
Confidence44
leadershipOne report1 publisher

Anthropic's 17-victim case anchors a pentest CEO's argument for retiring the annual pentest

Seemant Sehgal, whose firm sells continuous penetration testing, says AI agents have cut the skill needed to run a full intrusion campaign. His evidence is two August 2025 incidents and one unmeasured claim about speed.

Publishers:forbes.com

Reality

Evidence26
Adoption22
Hype gap+44
Incentives88
Confidence58
securityOne report1 publisher

Pen Test Partners retires the coffee shop hacker from the awareness deck

The firm's argument is that ubiquitous TLS moved the risk off the wire and onto patch state, fake login pages and certificate warnings people click through. That is where the training hour should go.

Reality

Evidence58
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+12
Incentives38
Confidence61
securityOne report1 publisher

Awareness training that grades grammar now measures a phishing style attackers dropped

The claim arrives as a Barracuda-authored commentary with one number behind it. The bill lands on awareness programs whose template libraries and click-rate baselines were built on deliberate typos.

Publishers:scworld.com

Reality

Evidence24
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+38
Incentives76
Confidence42
productOne report1 publisher

Quishing moves the login off the managed laptop and onto an unfiltered personal phone

Fast Company's roundup of four working email scams includes three that never show a link worth hovering over, which leaves both the awareness module and the mobile device policy answering a question users no longer face.

Publishers:fastcompany.com

Reality

Evidence38
Adoption
Not scored
Hype gap+25
Incentives25
Confidence50
securityOne report1 publisher

Hover-to-check is broken: 41 fake download sites show a real URL, then route the click

Malwarebytes found a 41-site network whose download buttons hold genuine Steam and VideoLAN links, then use JavaScript to send the click elsewhere. Awareness training needs a rewrite.

Publishers:malwarebytes.com

Reality

Evidence68
Adoption34
Hype gap+18
Incentives58
Confidence55