Strengthen Human Resilience During Cybersecurity Awareness Month - And All Year Long
Proofpoint, Tuesday, September 2nd, 2025
Modern cyberattacks don't just exploit technology-they exploit people. While email remains the primary attack vector, cybercriminals are expanding their tactics and exploiting additional channels, like Microsoft Teams, Slack, Zoom, LinkedIn, and WhatsApp.
This enables them to bypass traditional security and launch socially engineered attacks.
Once cybercriminals compromise an account, they work to deepen their foothold, avoid detection and set up further stages of their attack. This might mean data exfiltration, ransomware deployment, or financial theft.
Employees play a critical role in cybersecurity. According to Verizon's research, 90% of security incidents involve the human element. And in the Proofpoint 2024 State of the Phish report, we found that 96% of users who took risky actions did so knowingly. What's more, 99% of the organizations we monitor are regularly targeted for account takeovers.