Collaboration tools are becoming significant cybersecurity risk vectors
We’ve built our businesses around speed, efficiency, and constant connectivity. Collaboration platforms, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Zoom, Google Workspace, have become essential for staying productive and fast-moving. But as usage grows, so does exposure. These tools are quickly becoming prime targets for cyberattacks.
The reason is straightforward. These platforms connect your people, documents, meetings, and decisions. They carry sensitive conversations, strategy documents, customer information, all in one place. Bad actors see that as opportunity. And they’re not waiting. Vulnerabilities in these tools offer direct paths into the heart of your organization.
Security leaders are already signaling this shift. According to Mimecast’s “The State of Human Risk 2025,” 79% of CISOs believe collaboration apps introduce new security threats. Even more concerning, 61% of organizations expect to experience a breach through one of these tools. That’s not a risk to file under “potential.” It’s a forecast.
What does it mean for leadership? For one, collaboration software can no longer be treated as a basic utility. It is part of your security perimeter. The same scrutiny you apply to firewalls and endpoint protection must extend here. That means tighter integration with identity management. It means investing in threat detection tuned for collaboration environments. And it definitely means educating your teams, because most breaches start with human error.
The upside is this: Knowing the threat is the first step. These are tools we rely on for alignment, speed, and transparency. But trusting them means securing them. As adoption scales, maturity in how we manage their risks must scale with it.
The Nikkei Slack breach highlights the risks arising from compromised endpoints within employee devices
Nikkei’s Slack breach wasn’t due to some advanced, never-before-seen exploit. It came down to a single weak point: an employee’s personal device infected with typical malware. That malware stole Slack credentials, giving attackers access to over 17,000 accounts. Once inside, they accessed names, email addresses, and internal chat histories, exactly the kind of content that shouldn’t be floating around unsigned and unprotected.
This breach is a hard reminder. Your cybersecurity isn’t just about perimeter defense anymore. Endpoint security, especially across personal or hybrid-use devices, is where the gap often forms. In this case, the exposure came from a personal computer. That’s a problem, especially as hybrid and remote work models remain unstructured in many organizations.
An attacker doesn’t need to breach your servers. They just need valid credentials to walk straight in. That’s what happened here. There wasn’t a vulnerability in Slack itself, it was about credential compromise through malware, no two-factor authentication barriers, and ultimately, a lack of endpoint oversight.
The real issue for leaders: how much control do you have over the devices employees use to access core systems? Are you enforcing device hygiene, encryption, and multi-factor authentication across all endpoints, not just corporate-owned hardware? Most aren’t. And that’s the opening threat actors are using.
This breach wasn’t theoretical. Nikkei, one of the largest media conglomerates in Asia, had to manage not just internal exposure but potential partner-related fallout. Password resets alone don’t solve reputation damage.
It’s a reminder that risk doesn’t always originate from system flaws. Sometimes it’s as simple, and as dangerous, as assuming a personal device won’t become a business risk. That assumption is no longer acceptable.
Microsoft teams vulnerabilities enable attackers to manipulate messages and impersonate key personnel
Microsoft Teams is embedded in daily operations across millions of organizations. It’s not just chat, it’s meetings, document sharing, communications across departments, vendors, and leadership. That’s what makes the recent discovery of multiple vulnerabilities by Check Point Research so significant.
Attackers can edit messages in Teams without leaving visible signs of modification. They can change sender display names, spoof notifications, and manipulate caller identity during conference calls. That combination opens the door to targeted impersonation, especially of executives, and high-impact social engineering.
When attackers gain the ability to make messages appear as though they’re coming from a trusted executive or peer, without alerting the victim, that’s not a small flaw. It redlines user trust and weakens the core assumption behind real-time collaboration: that you’re communicating with the person you think you’re communicating with. The implications for fraud, miscommunication, and unauthorized approvals are immediate and serious.
Microsoft acted fast. It released several updates, with the latest fixes addressing the audio and video vulnerabilities just last month. That’s good. But it’s not the whole story. The key takeaway for executives isn’t that Microsoft responded, it’s that a platform used by over 320 million people globally had these gaps in the first place. And despite ongoing patching, the scale of impact shows how complex and fast-moving enterprise software threats really are.
This demands a shift. Real-time communication tools must be treated as potential attack surfaces, not just productivity utilities. That means security teams need access to Teams telemetry. Executive impersonation risks must be addressed not just with technical patching, but awareness training at leadership levels. And you need clear internal workflows to verify or flag unusual requests, especially when they seem to come from the top.
Cybercriminals leverage trust to get results. This is a case study in how fast, and quietly, they can do it if we’re not paying attention.
ChatGPT exhibits critical vulnerabilities that expose users to data theft and manipulation risks
ChatGPT is being integrated into more business workflows, often without a clear understanding of how its underlying architecture handles input, processes data, or interacts with external content. This is a security gap, and recent findings from Tenable show why it needs to be taken seriously, especially if you’re deploying AI models across your enterprise.
Tenable researchers identified seven high-risk vulnerabilities in ChatGPT that allow attackers to bypass trust barriers without requiring victims to knowingly interact. These include indirect prompt injection, where benign websites are manipulated to silently insert commands into ChatGPT, and zero-click techniques where simply loading a malicious ChatGPT link can compromise user sessions. That means attackers can exfiltrate private conversation logs, redirect chatbot behavior, or bypass OpenAI’s built-in safety filters, without obvious signs of tampering.
More concerning is that these vulnerabilities stem from the way ChatGPT and SearchGPT interpret external content. Because the models are designed to interface dynamically with the web and user prompts, they can become conduits for unintended access points. In this case, attackers manipulate how the model parses user-generated web content, like poisoned blog comments or URL metadata, resulting in persistent, unauthorized access to a user’s session.
OpenAI was informed of these vulnerabilities as early as April. While some fixes have been issued, several issues remain unresolved as of the latest reporting. This isn’t a case of neglect, it highlights the complexity of securing evolving AI systems that interact autonomously with external data and real-time user inputs.
Enterprise leaders adopting generative AI tools need to recalibrate their approach. Deployment shouldn’t just be about rollout and access, it has to include layered security reviews, usage policies, and continuous third-party evaluation. Blind trust in these models, no matter how user-friendly or advanced they seem, invites exploitation.
AI can deliver enormous value at scale, but no value is worth the price of compromised privacy, intellectual property loss, or regulatory fallout. If you’re deploying AI models into user-facing environments, especially connected to sensitive data, prioritize strong red-teaming and scenario-based testing before full integration.
Key executive takeaways
- Collaboration apps introduce real and immediate cybersecurity risk: Leaders should treat collaboration platforms as active attack surfaces, not passive utilities. With 79% of security leaders recognizing them as threats and 61% expecting breaches, proactive monitoring and access control are critical.
- Endpoint security is a weak link in collaboration tool use: Breaches like the one at Nikkei show that a single compromised employee device can jeopardize thousands of accounts. Executives must enforce strict device security, MFA, and real-time credential monitoring across all endpoints.
- Social engineering pressure points are increasing within messaging platforms: Microsoft Teams vulnerabilities enabled message manipulation and executive impersonation. Decision-makers must prioritize incident response planning, leadership-level awareness training, and audit controls for internal communications.
- AI-based tools like ChatGPT are exposing new attack surfaces: Unfixed vulnerabilities in ChatGPT allow zero-click prompt injections and persistent access. Enterprises integrating AI must allocate budget and oversight toward security testing and usage governance to avoid long-term exposure.
