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Every October, Cybersecurity Awareness Month is a reminder to measure the strength of our defenses. For security leaders in 2025, impersonation remains the one risk that has moved to the center of the conversation.
In 2025, identity has become the front line. High-profile impersonations and sharp increases in reported scams show that attackers no longer need to break systems to cause damage. For CISOs and security leaders, the next imperative is clear: trust must be anchored in people, not just in the systems and devices around them.
Key signals of this shift:
- Impersonation scams grew 148% year over year, now making up a third of all scams reported.
- AI has lowered the barrier, enabling attackers to clone voices, emails, and even identities at scale.
- Supply chains are an open door, with vendors and contractors often trusted with less scrutiny than employees.
A Wake-Up Call at the Highest Levels
This summer, an attacker used AI to impersonate Senator Marco Rubio. Messages went out to governors, members of Congress, and even foreign ministers. For a time, these officials believed they were corresponding with the Senator himself.
No network was breached. No firewall was bypassed. What failed was trust.
If government leaders can be fooled by an imposter, so can executives, employees, and vendors inside any enterprise.
The Scale of the Problem
Impersonation has become a mainstream attack vector. A hijacked laptop looks like a legitimate device. A familiar name or voice can be convincingly faked. Systems continue to see what they expect, while an imposter takes control.
The Identity Theft Resource Center’s 2025 Trends in Identity Report underscores how common this has become. Impersonation scams increased 148% year over year and now account for a third of all scams reported. It’s clear generative AI has lowered the barrier; attackers can clone an executive’s voice from a conference panel, replicate vendor emails, or even present convincing synthetic identities during onboarding.
The Enterprise Stakes
Impersonation is not just a technical problem; it’s a business problem. A single convincing scam can redirect millions of dollars, expose sensitive data, fracture customer relationships, and draw regulatory scrutiny.
And the risk doesn’t stop at the workforce. Vendors and contractors are common targets because they’re often trusted with less scrutiny. That makes the supply chain an open door for attackers into larger organizations.
For boards, regulators, and customers, the question is increasingly the same: how do you know who is really on the other end?
The Next Era of Security
Verifying the human isn’t another point solution. It’s the next strategic layer of enterprise security. For modern organizations, this means elevating workforce identity verification as a standard.
- Confirm workforce identity before high-risk actions like payments, privileged access, or vendor onboarding.
- Move verification out of tamperable environments like browsers and laptops.
- Hold vendors and partners to the same verification standards as employees.
- Embed identity verification into culture so it becomes a workforce-wide habit, not an exception.
This is how organizations can protect the trust that underpins every transaction, every relationship, and every decision.
The Imperative for Security Leaders
Cybersecurity Awareness Month is about more than awareness. It’s about adapting to the risks that define this era.
The organizations that stay ahead will be the ones that verify the human behind every request. Protecting identity is no longer optional. It is the next imperative for enterprise security practice.
Trust grows when we know who is really on the other end. Learn how Nametag helps enterprises verify the human behind every workforce request.
