30
60
Phishing Research Challenges Conventional Security Awareness Testing
Pistachio's 2.47 million phishing simulations across 1,200 organizations show click rates alone mislead, with 30% of IT staff clicking and leak rates more predictive.
Between June 2025 and May 2026, Pistachio sent 2.47 million simulated phishing attempts to more than 123,000 employees at over 1,200 organizations, analyzing click, credential-leak and reporting behavior. Click rates ranged from 26% in Design to 41% in Construction; 30% of tech development and IT staff clicked at least once, while financial services were the most resilient sector. The report argues that click rate alone creates a false sense of security and that combined click, leak and report trends are better resilience indicators.
45
30
55
42
42
60
60
30
30
30
30
30
30
EdgeVerve and Minit to offer improved operational efficiency and increased business value to clients
30
30
Companies may be measuring phishing resilience the wrong way
Pistachio's 2026 report analyzing 648 organizations finds click rates alone mislead; combining clicks, credential submission, and reporting better measures phishing resilience.
Pistachio's Phishing Behaviour Report 2026 analyzed 648 organizations and 123,692 users across 354,962 simulations between June 1, 2025 and May 31, 2026. It found click and credential-submission rates rose during the first six months of training before declining, and from the six-month peak to the 12-month stage clicks fell 27% while credential leaks dropped 41%. The report-to-click ratio increased from 1.3 at three months to 1.8 at 12 months, framing employees as an active detection channel. Departmental analysis showed Construction had the highest cumulative click rate (41.31%) and Health the lowest report rate (13.17%), supporting more targeted training.
28
42
55
30
55
45
30
57
55
45
42
42
Simulation: the new Scaling Law — Joon Sung Park, Simile AI
Simile AI raised a $2B Series B from GreenOaks and Index Ventures to scale human-behavior simulation for Fortune 100 clients like CVS.
Simile AI, co-founded by Generative Agents researcher Joon Sung Park, announced a $2 billion Series B backed by GreenOaks and Index Ventures, with Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy among backers. The company runs tens of millions of simulations for Fortune 100 clients including CVS, reporting 85-99% accuracy versus human focus groups and digital twins of 1,000 real people at 85% behavioral accuracy. The long-term ambition is foundation models of human behavior, post-trained on interviews, transaction data, and randomized controlled trials, potentially simulating all 8 billion people.
58
AI Agents Are Here. So Are the Threats.
Unit 42 demonstrates nine framework-agnostic attack scenarios against AI agents built with CrewAI and AutoGen, causing data leakage, credential theft and remote code execution.
Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 investigated how attackers can target agentic applications, implementing two functionally identical apps with the open-source CrewAI and AutoGen frameworks and executing the same attacks on both. Nine attack scenarios produce outcomes including information leakage, credential theft, tool exploitation and remote code execution. Findings show most vulnerabilities are framework-agnostic, arising from insecure design patterns, misconfigurations and unsafe tool integrations rather than flaws in the frameworks themselves. The team published defense strategies per scenario and open-sourced the source code and datasets on GitHub.
58
60
55
60
30
Why Johnny Can't Encrypt: A Usability Evaluation of PGP 5.0 (1999)
Seminal 1999 USENIX study finds most novice users cannot correctly sign and encrypt email with PGP 5.0 in 90 minutes.
Whitten and Tygar's USENIX Security Symposium paper evaluates whether cryptography novices can use PGP 5.0 effectively, using cognitive walkthrough analysis and a laboratory user test. The majority of test participants failed to successfully sign and encrypt a message within 90 minutes, despite PGP 5.0 having a well-regarded graphical interface. The authors argue that security requires usability standards beyond those of general consumer software and propose domain-specific UI design principles for security. The paper is a foundational reference in usable security research.
24
30
57
47
42