An email lands in the inbox on a Tuesday morning.
It appears to come from the CEO. The sender name is right, the tone sounds convincing, and the signature looks legitimate.
"Hey — can you help me with something quickly? I'm tied up in back-to-back meetings. Please handle a vendor payment for me. I'll explain later."
The new hire hesitates.
They've only been with the company for four days. They're still learning the workflow, still figuring out what normal looks like, and they definitely don't want to be the person who challenges the CEO during their first week.
So they do the helpful thing and move forward.
And in that moment, the damage is already underway.
Why the first week is the highest-risk week
Every spring, companies welcome a fresh wave of employees, including recent graduates and summer interns stepping into their first professional roles. For leadership teams, it's onboarding season. For attackers, it's an opportunity.
Keepnet Lab's 2025 New Hires Phishing Susceptibility Report found that CEO impersonation emails are 45% more likely to succeed with new hires than with experienced staff.
Cybercriminals don't always target your most experienced people. They often go after the ones still getting oriented because there is a brief period where everything feels unfamiliar and nothing is fully clear.
A new employee may not know what a normal request looks like yet. They may not understand how the CEO typically communicates. They have not had time to build instinct or confidence, and attackers use that uncertainty to their advantage.
But here's the important part: the new hire is not the real issue. The biggest risk isn't the employee who makes a mistake. It's the one who is trying to be helpful.
If you lead a business, you probably already know exactly who on your team would reply first.
The real breakdown isn't training. It's the setup.
Think back to that employee's first day.
The laptop wasn't ready. Access wasn't fully provisioned. The email account was still being created. They borrowed a coworker's login to check something fast. They saved a document locally because the shared drive wasn't available. They used their personal phone to look up a client number because it was quicker.
None of that seemed dangerous. It felt practical. It felt like adapting and getting work done on a busy first day.
But during that first week, before everything is properly in place, a few silent problems begin to stack up. Shared credentials create accounts no one tracks. Files are stored outside backup systems. Personal devices touch business data. No one explains what to do when something doesn't look right.
According to the same Keepnet report, new employees are 44% more susceptible to phishing than tenured staff. That gap is not driven by negligence. It comes from disorder. When onboarding is chaotic, security becomes an afterthought. That's the environment a phishing email relies on.
The attack didn't create the weakness. The first day did.
What a secure first day should look like
Solving this doesn't require a long security lecture on day one. It requires three essentials to be ready before the new hire ever arrives.
1. Their access is ready, not improvised.
That means the laptop is prepared, credentials are set up, and permissions are clearly defined. No borrowed logins, no temporary fixes, and no "we'll handle that later this week."
2. They understand what a normal request looks like in your company.
This can be a quick 10-minute conversation. Does the CEO ever email about payments? Does anyone? What should they do if something seems suspicious? This is not formal training; it's basic orientation.
3. They have a safe place to ask questions.
The employee who paused before opening that email probably would have asked someone if they knew who to ask. Many first-week mistakes happen quietly because new hires do not want to appear inexperienced.
Give them a person. Give them a process.
Most security incidents don't happen because someone ignores the rules. They happen because someone has not learned them yet.
Maybe your onboarding is already strong. Maybe your team is small enough that first days feel more personal than procedural. But if you've ever had a new hire improvise their way through week one — or if you're preparing to hire this spring — it's worth having the conversation before that Tuesday email arrives.
Click here or give us a call at (646) 989-9900 to schedule your free Business Technology Alignment Assessment.
And if you know another business owner who is about to hire, share this with them. The best time to shut that door is before anyone tries to walk through it.
