Attackers do not check your headcount first
Security awareness training that costs less than a coffee per person per month, with no seat minimum and nothing to install.
The reason small companies get hit is not that they are interesting. It is that the attacks are automated, the lists are bought, and it costs nothing to try you. Nobody picked you.
What is different at your size is not the threat, it is the room to absorb it. There is no security team, the person who does IT also does three other jobs, and a single fraudulent invoice is a genuinely bad month.
The evidence, and where it comes from
Every figure below links to the source it came from. We have quoted what each number counts, because a percentage without its denominator is not evidence, it is decoration.
confirmed breaches at small and medium businesses appear in this year's dataset, out of 7,256 incidents recorded for that group.[1]
of those breaches came from just three patterns: System Intrusion, Basic Web Application Attacks and Social Engineering. The list of things you have to be ready for is short.[1]
involved the human element and 55% involved a third party. In the report's own words, small organisations are disproportionally impacted by ransomware and face many of the same threats as everyone else, but often with fewer resources available.[1]
The report groups small and medium businesses as one category, and warns that comparisons between industries and sizes are affected by differing reporting requirements and sample sizes. Read 45% as this dataset's small-business figure, not as a national rate.
Sized for a company without a security team
No seat minimum
Three people pay for three people. There is no floor to clear and no annual commitment, and one person can buy it for themselves if the company will not.
Nothing to install, nobody to train
It runs in a browser, on a phone or a laptop. No plugin, no admin rights, no rollout project. Invite by email and people are playing the same afternoon.
Two minutes, or it will not happen
One scam to judge, every day. The questions are a short set once a week. Anything longer competes with the actual job and loses, which is how most training quietly dies.
You can see who has not done it
Completion per person, dated, with certificates carrying a serial anyone can check. That is the form an insurer or an auditor asks for when they stop accepting a tick in a box, and it is also just useful for knowing who to nudge.
Plan a year of weekly missions
Set your team's weekly training topics months ahead, or drop a timely one in fast when a new scam is going around. Aim a week at one department, and preview what a newer person and your most experienced person will each see before it goes out. Make any week a required course, and it lands in your evidence pack.
What your people will practise, explained free
These are the same scams this page is about, written for the person who has to spot one on a Tuesday morning. No account needed to read them.
What is true in every sector
of breaches involved the human element, up from 60% the year before, across more than 22,000 confirmed breaches in 145 countries.[1]
of breaches began with vulnerability exploitation, which this year overtook credential abuse (down to 13%) as the single most common way in. People are involved in most breaches, but they are not the most common entry point, and we are not going to tell you otherwise.[1]
of breaches came through social engineering, the third most common pattern. In simulations, the median click rate for voice and text lures runs 40% higher than for email.[1]
And the uncomfortable part, which we would rather you heard from us
One of the largest field studies of phishing training ever published followed roughly 19,500 staff at a large health system through ten simulated campaigns over eight months. It did not flatter the industry we are in.
was the entire effect of embedded phishing training on the likelihood of clicking a phishing link. Having recently completed annual mandatory security training showed no significant relationship with falling for phishing at all.[2]
of the people who landed on the training page spent a minute or less on it, and about a third closed it immediately. That is a finding about attention, not about people being careless.[2]
We read that as the strongest argument for how BadgerQuest is built, not against it. What the study measured is the industry standard: an annual module, an ambush simulation, and a training page served to somebody who has just been told they failed. Nobody reads that page. Training that gets skimmed for forty seconds is not a smaller dose of training that works, it is a different thing entirely.
So the daily round is two minutes and it is a game, because that is the version people voluntarily finish. We do not send simulated phishing to real inboxes, because being ambushed by your own IT department is what produces the closed tab. Nobody is shamed for a wrong call, and what we train is the judgement to tell the two apart rather than a reflex to flag everything. Topics somebody keeps missing come back around instead of being marked complete.
The study's authors also recommend refocusing on technical countermeasures, specifically two-factor authentication and password managers that only fill on the correct domain. They are right, and those will stop more attacks than any training will. Do them first. We will say the same on a sales call. Training is for the part those controls do not cover, and it should be honest about being exactly that.
Sources
Read them yourself. That is the entire habit we are trying to teach, and it would be a strange thing for us to ask of your staff and not of ourselves.
- Verizon Business. 2026 Data Breach Investigations Report, Executive Summary 19th edition, published May 2026. More than 31,000 security incidents, of which more than 22,000 were confirmed data breaches, across organisations in 145 countries. Figures quoted here are from the executive summary PDF.
- Ho et al., University of Chicago, UC San Diego and UC San Diego Health. Understanding the Efficacy of Phishing Training in Practice 46th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy, May 2025. Roughly 19,500 staff at UC San Diego Health, ten simulated campaigns over eight months. Findings summarised by UC San Diego Today, 17 September 2025.
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