social-engineering
(7)
The Phishing Trap That Learned to Leave the Inbox
A former malware researcher noticed that the dangerous thing was often the page, not the file. SlashNext followed the bait from inbox to browser to phone - and Varonis paid about $106 million to bring that view into its security platform.
KnowBe4 Built a $4.6 Billion Business by Sending Employees Fake Phishing Emails
The Clearwater company made human error measurable, trainable and billable. Then a fake North Korean hire slipped through its own interviews - and gave the security trainer its most convincing lesson yet.
Brian Long Built Two Marketing Companies. Then a Fake Brian Texted His Team.
After TapCommerce and Attentive, the repeat founder chose a less comfortable problem: teaching companies to recognize the voices, messages and faces that AI can counterfeit.
Eric Smith Built a Career by Asking Security to Prove It
For nearly three decades, the Lares co-founder has treated cybersecurity as a claim that must survive contact with reality. His work helped give penetration testers a shared playbook - and executives a more useful question than “Are we compliant?”
The Company That Attacks You Before the Scammers Do
AI made it cheap to clone a CEO's voice and email 10,000 employees at once. Adaptive Security's answer is to run those attacks first - as a drill - and see who clicks.
Noam Awadish
Noam Awadish is the co-founder and CEO of imper.ai, a cybersecurity company that launched in December 2025 with $28 million in funding to detect AI-driven impersonation and social engineering attacks in real time. Before imper.ai, Awadish spent more than a decade in Israel's elite Unit 8200 as Head of Initial Access, then served as Chief of Staff for Autonomous Vehicle Programs at Mobileye. He founded imper.ai with two other 8200 veterans, Anatoly Blighovsky and Rom Dudkiewicz, to build a platform that scans device telemetry and network diagnostics rather than trying to out-detect generative models.
Jericho Security
Jericho Security is a New York-based cybersecurity company that uses generative AI to defend organizations against AI-powered attacks. Its platform runs hyper-realistic, AI-generated phishing, voice-clone, and deepfake simulations to train employees, then measures human risk through a dashboard of analytics and KPIs. Founded in 2023, the company pits an AI 'red team' against an AI 'blue team' to find and close the gaps attackers now exploit at machine speed - an approach it sums up as fighting AI with AI.