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A hacker doesn’t need to crack your encryption. They just need to convince one employee to help them.

Social engineering attacks exploit human psychology instead of technical vulnerabilities. While your security team patches software and monitors networks, attackers study your organization chart, LinkedIn profiles, and even your company’s Glassdoor reviews. They’re looking for ways to manipulate the humans behind your defenses.

These attacks work because they target something no firewall can protect: the natural human tendencies to trust, help, and comply with authority.

Every organization trains employees to recognize phishing. Most still get breached anyway.

The problem isn’t awareness. It’s application. Employees who ace multiple-choice quizzes about phishing indicators still click malicious links when those links arrive in their actual inbox. The gap between knowing and doing is where breaches happen.

Phishing simulation training closes that gap by creating controlled practice opportunities. Instead of telling employees what phishing looks like, simulations show them and measure whether training translates to behavior.

$50 billion. That’s what business email compromise (BEC) attacks have stolen since the FBI Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) started tracking them. The average loss per incident is $125,000 according to FBI IC3 data, though some organizations lose millions in a single attack.

Here’s what makes BEC particularly frustrating to defend against: there’s no malware to scan, no suspicious attachment to sandbox, no sketchy link for your email gateway to flag. These attacks work by impersonating someone the target trusts, asking for something that sounds reasonable, and relying on normal business processes to deliver the money.

Your technical controls won’t catch them. Your employees have to.

KnowBe4 dominates the security awareness training market. But market dominance doesn’t mean every organization is best served by the leader.

Whether you’re evaluating options for the first time, outgrowing your current solution, or discovering that KnowBe4’s approach doesn’t match your needs, alternatives exist across every price point and feature set. We’ve been in this space long enough to know that the right security awareness training platform depends entirely on your specific context.

This comparison covers what different platforms offer, where they excel, and which organizational contexts they serve best.

According to Deloitte research, 91% of cyber attacks still start with an email.

That number hasn’t moved much in years. We’ve deployed spam filters, secure email gateways, AI-powered anomaly detection, and a dozen other technical controls. Attackers don’t care. When one tactic gets blocked, they try another. When detection catches a pattern, they change the pattern.

The technology arms race is unwinnable on its own. Trained employees add a different kind of defense, one that applies judgment and recognizes context. A well-crafted spear phishing email might slide past every filter you own, but an employee who knows to verify unexpected requests kills the attack anyway.