An email lands on a Tuesday morning.
It appears to come from the CEO. The name is right. The voice sounds right. Even the signature feels legitimate.
"Hey — can you help me with something quickly? I'm stuck in meetings and need you to take care of a vendor payment. I'll fill you in later."
The new hire stops for a moment.
They've only been at the company for four days. They're still learning the workflow. They don't yet know what counts as standard, and they definitely don't want to be the person who challenges the CEO in their first week.
So they do what seems helpful and move forward.
And in that instant, the damage begins.
Why week one is the riskiest week
Every spring, companies welcome a new group of employees, often recent graduates and summer interns stepping into their first professional roles. For your team, that means onboarding. For cybercriminals, it means opportunity.
According to Keepnet Lab's 2025 New Hires Phishing Susceptibility Report, CEO impersonation emails are 45% more likely to succeed with new hires than with experienced employees.
Attackers don't usually target your most experienced people. They focus on the ones still getting oriented, because the earliest days create a gap where everything feels new and nothing feels certain.
A new employee may not know what a typical request looks like. They may not know how the CEO usually communicates. They haven't had time to build confidence or pattern recognition, and criminals exploit that uncertainty.
But the real issue isn't the new hire. The biggest risk isn't someone being careless. It's someone trying hard to be helpful.
If you manage a business, you probably already know exactly who on your team would answer first.
The real problem isn't training. It's the setup.
Think back to that employee's first day.
The laptop wasn't ready. Access wasn't fully configured. The email account was still being created. They borrowed a coworker's login to check something quickly. They saved a file on the device because the shared drive wasn't available. They used their personal phone to look up a client number because it was faster.
None of that felt dangerous. It felt practical. It felt like getting through a busy first day.
But during that first week, before everything is properly in place, several risks build quietly. Shared credentials create accounts no one monitors, files sit outside backup systems, personal devices touch business data, and no one explains what to do when something feels suspicious.
The same Keepnet report found that new employees are 44% more susceptible to phishing than tenured staff. That difference isn't about recklessness. It's about disorder. When onboarding is messy, security becomes an afterthought. That's the environment the phishing email is built to exploit.
The attack didn't create the weakness. The first day did.
What a secure first day should include
Solving this doesn't require a lengthy security lecture on day one. It requires three things to be in place before the new hire ever walks through the door.
1. Their access is ready, not improvised.
That means the laptop is prepared, credentials are set up, and permissions are clearly assigned. No borrowed logins, no temporary fixes, and no "we'll handle that later this week."
2. They understand what normal communication looks like in your company.
This can be a fast 10-minute conversation. Does the CEO ever email about payments? Does anyone? What should they do if a message feels unusual? This isn't formal training; it's basic orientation.
3. They have a safe place to ask questions.
The employee who hesitated before opening that email likely would have asked for help if they knew who to contact. Most first-week mistakes happen quietly because new hires don't want to seem inexperienced.
Give them a person. Give them a process.
Most security mistakes don't happen because someone ignores the rules. They happen because someone hasn't learned the rules yet.
Maybe your onboarding process is already strong. Maybe your team is small enough that first days feel more personal than procedural. But if you've ever seen a new hire improvise through week one — or you're planning to add someone this spring — it's worth addressing before that Tuesday email shows up.
Click here or give us a call at (805) 295-8883 to schedule your free 10-Minute Discovery Call.
And if you know another business owner who is about to hire, send this their way. The smartest time to close that gap is before anyone has the chance to walk through it.
