What Happened
68%. That single figure from the 2024 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report — the share of breaches involving the human element — explains why a marketing technology company just entered the security education space targeting executives who rarely appear on a vendor's ideal customer profile.
According to the Carroll County Mirror-Democrat, Avioneer Intelligent Marketing announced on July 8, 2026 a structured B2B security training program built around NIST Cybersecurity Framework 2.0 and the MITRE ATT&CK Matrix. NIST CSF 2.0 is the federal government's updated security blueprint, released in February 2024 with a new 'Govern' function expanding its scope from critical infrastructure to all organizations. MITRE ATT&CK is a publicly available knowledge base that maps how real threat actors move through corporate environments — think of it as a playbook of attacker moves, written by defenders. The program covers three domains: AI-driven threat recognition, ransomware prevention protocols, and proactive data protection strategy.
Critically, the initiative is designed for non-technical business leaders, not IT departments. That positioning matters. Gartner analysts have identified 'the increasing demand for proactive IT and cybersecurity management among mid-market B2B companies that lack the internal resources to navigate modern threat landscapes' as a top business priority — and those firms' executives are rarely who traditional security training programs are built for.
The Threat Has Outpaced Most Training Programs
Here is the problem older security training cannot solve. SANS Institute research consistently identifies human error and insufficient awareness training as the primary entry points for successful attacks. But the nature of those attacks has changed faster than curricula have updated.
As of July 9, 2026, AI deepfakes now drive 40% of business email compromise (BEC) attacks — a form of fraud where attackers impersonate executives or vendors to trigger unauthorized wire transfers. That figure sat under 5% in 2023. According to industry data current as of July 9, 2026, deepfake-enabled fraud attempts increased by over 1,300% year-over-year, with large enterprises losing an average of $680,000 per deepfake attack. Large language models (LLMs — AI systems that generate convincing human-like text) now produce personalized phishing messages at scale, bypassing the grammatical errors that older detection training taught employees to spot.
Chart: Deepfake-driven share of business email compromise attacks, 2023 vs. 2026. Source: Industry data current as of July 9, 2026.
IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report placed the average breach cost at $4.88 million — a 10% increase from 2023 and the largest single-year spike since the pandemic. IBM researchers noted that 'lost business and post-breach customer and third-party response costs drove the year-over-year cost spike.' Organizations running active security awareness programs, by contrast, experienced 70% fewer security incidents and averaged 5x return on program cost, according to industry benchmarks current as of July 9, 2026.
This pattern connects directly to what security researchers have been documenting at the infrastructure layer. As the cybersecurity team at NewLens documented in the GCP Dialogflow vulnerability breakdown, modern attack surfaces increasingly exploit configuration gaps and human decisions — not just code vulnerabilities. The two threat surfaces are converging.
Photo by Marcel Petzold on Unsplash
The Job Mid-Market Firms Are Actually Hiring For
Using a jobs-to-be-done lens — the idea that buyers 'hire' a product or service to solve a specific problem at a specific moment — Avioneer's program is targeting a narrow job: helping non-technical executives recognize and respond to AI-powered threats without requiring them to become security professionals. That is a meaningfully different job than what most compliance-driven security awareness training has historically delivered.
Traditional programs were designed to satisfy auditors: an annual video module, a phishing simulation click report, a signed policy acknowledgment. That model works when regulators are the primary audience. It fails when the threat actor is an LLM generating a CFO voice clone at 7 p.m. on a Friday.
As of July 9, 2026, the security awareness training market stands at $6.74 billion, according to industry analysis, and is projected to grow to $14.66 billion by 2031 at a 16.82% compound annual growth rate. That growth is not coming from IT departments buying compliance checkbox tools — it reflects organizations recognizing the human layer as an active, ongoing attack surface. According to industry research current as of July 9, 2026, 96% of security professionals say there is a strong link between security awareness efforts and their company's cybersecurity resilience, either as a direct result or a strong contributor of training.
For mid-market firms evaluating business tools and productivity software in this space, the landscape includes enterprise-oriented platforms like KnowBe4 and Proofpoint Security Awareness Training, and lighter SaaS options — Curricula, Ninjio, Hoxhunt — designed for teams that want workflow automation built into training delivery. Avioneer's entry positions the program as a strategic advisory layer for leadership, not a technical administration platform. Whether that positioning holds at scale remains an open question, since advisory-style programs live or die by content update velocity and facilitator quality in a way that self-paced SaaS platforms do not.
What Committing to a Program Actually Costs
Three costs vendor demos routinely skip.
Time-to-behavior-change is longer than time-to-completion. A 90-minute phishing module completed in a browser does not change how an executive responds to a deepfake audio call. Security awareness training only translates into measurable incident reduction when it is repeated, role-specific, and regularly tested against current threat simulations — not just tracked as a completion percentage in an LMS (learning management system, the software organizations use to assign and monitor training).
Content shelf life is compressing fast. The MITRE ATT&CK framework updates quarterly to reflect active threat actor tactics. Any program that cannot demonstrate a content refresh cadence tied to that update cycle is selling last year's threat model. NIST CSF 2.0's addition of the 'Govern' function in February 2024 also changed regulatory expectations for organizations across sectors — programs built on the original framework are misaligned with current standards.
Measurement is where most programs go quiet. Aggregate studies reporting 70% incident reduction sound compelling. What's harder to obtain before signing: firm-specific pre/post phishing simulation click rates, time-to-report metrics, and risk-score trending over time. For teams investing in team collaboration and security culture together, ask for pilot data before committing to an annual contract.
Bottom Line
Avioneer's announcement is a signal, not a revelation. The human-risk gap in mid-market B2B security has been documented for years. What's changed is the weaponization speed: adversaries are now deploying AI to run personalized attacks at machine scale, and most awareness programs were not designed for that environment. Structuring a program around NIST 2.0 and ATT&CK for a non-technical leadership audience is a more sophisticated design choice than most annual compliance training offers.
In my analysis, the firms most likely to benefit from programs like Avioneer's are those that have already cleared the compliance baseline and now face a harder problem: building genuine threat awareness in an executive team that has never thought of itself as an attack surface. The firms that should wait are those still missing foundational incident response documentation — no awareness training fixes a process that does not exist yet. Solve the process first, then train people to execute it.
North America is expected to hold approximately 45% of the global cyber security training market share through the 2026-2035 forecast period, according to projections current as of July 9, 2026, driven by workforce upskilling investments and stringent regulatory compliance requirements. For mid-market B2B firms sitting inside that market, the question is not whether to invest in security awareness training. It is whether the program targets the actual current threat — and most currently do not.
Frequently Asked Questions
How effective is security awareness training for small and mid-market businesses?
As of July 9, 2026, according to industry benchmarks, organizations with active security awareness training programs experienced 70% fewer security incidents and averaged 5x return on program cost compared to organizations without structured training. SANS Institute research also identifies insufficient awareness training as one of the primary entry points for successful attacks. Effectiveness, however, depends heavily on frequency, role-specificity, and whether the training covers current threat vectors like AI-generated phishing and deepfake audio — not just legacy email scams.
How much does security awareness training cost for a mid-market company?
Pricing varies significantly by delivery model. Enterprise-focused platforms like KnowBe4 and Proofpoint typically price per seat annually, ranging from roughly $15 to $35 per user per year at mid-market scale, with costs rising for advanced phishing simulation and reporting features. Lighter SaaS platforms aimed at smaller teams can run lower. Advisory-style programs like the one Avioneer is launching are generally structured as service engagements rather than per-seat subscriptions, which means pricing depends on scope and duration. Given that IBM's 2024 Cost of a Data Breach Report pegged the average breach cost at $4.88 million, even a program costing tens of thousands of dollars annually represents a fraction of downside risk.
How often should security awareness training be done to meaningfully reduce breach risk?
Annual one-time training is the compliance minimum — it is not sufficient against current threat actors. Security professionals broadly recommend monthly micro-training modules supplemented by quarterly phishing simulations and immediate just-in-time training triggered by actual near-miss events. The MITRE ATT&CK framework updates quarterly, meaning any program with longer content refresh cycles is working from an increasingly stale threat picture. Role-specific cadences also matter: executives, finance team members, and IT staff face different threat vectors and need tailored frequency and content.
Disclaimer: This article is editorial commentary based on publicly reported facts and is intended for informational purposes only. Tool features, pricing, and market data may change. Always verify current details with official sources and qualified cybersecurity professionals before making purchasing decisions. Research based on publicly available sources current as of July 9, 2026.