In the relentless growth of the phishing landscape, technical advances like AI have made attack methods two-pronged. They target technical weaknesses and use identity-based attacks to bypass defenses that land directly in end user inboxes.
If you are still relying solely on a traditional secure email gateway (SEG), you are gambling with a massive vulnerability window.
The Harsh Reality of the Tech Gap
New data from PhishER Plus reveals a startling trend: over an eight-month period in 2025, 22 leading email security platforms, including SEGs, missed an average of 37% of reported emails that were actually threats found and reported by end users.
While these “leading” platforms struggle, our data shows:
- 14.1 Million Misses: PhishER Plus identified millions of phishing attempts that had already slipped past traditional SEG defenses and inferior integrated cloud email security (ICES) solutions.
- 300% Failure Increase: Traditional SEGs are missing up to 300% more phishing attacks per 10,000 emails than they were just a year ago.
- The Five-Hour Danger Zone: 31% of IT teams take more than five hours to respond to a security issue, leaving threats to sit in inboxes undetected.
Triple-Validated Intelligence is The New Gold Standard
To move beyond these limitations, organizations need triple-validated threat intelligence and an integrated defense that combines two powerful layers:
- 15 Years of Human Intelligence & 13+ Million Global Users: We fuse our proprietary AI insights, taught on 15 years of human behavior data, with the real-time reporting power of 13+ million global users to catch threats no other single organization can stop alone.
- Elite Threat Lab Vetting & Integrated Feeds: Our defensive layer is bolstered by the KnowBe4 Threat Research Lab and seamless integrations with third-party threat feeds like CrowdStrike, VirusTotal and Webroot to provide a definitive view of risk.
Staying Status Quo Is Not Going to Work in 2026
Moving on from your current email security provider isn’t just about better software; it’s about a better organizational strategy.
Humans + AI: Better Than Your SEG
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