From faux password resets to convincing emails impersonating the CEO, phishing assaults have change into cybercriminals’ go-to weapon, and they’re working. The truth is, over 90% of cyberattacks begin with phishing.
Powered by generative AI, attackers craft hyper-personalised, error-free messages at scale. Consequently, companies will not be simply coping with spam; they face monetary losses, reputational injury, and social engineering assaults that bypass instruments and go straight for folks. To fight these next-gen threats, corporations are turning to superior cloud e mail safety options constructed to detect and defuse subtle phishing assaults.
This text will break down the commonest phishing assault varieties, backed by real-world examples concentrating on a number of the largest manufacturers.
12 largest phishing assaults in historical past: At a look
| Kind of assault | Entity affected | What occurred | Affect |
| E-mail phishing | Yahoo (2012–2016) | A number of breaches between 2012 and 2016, compromising names, emails, birthdates, and hashed passwords. | Popularity injury, acquisition worth lowered by Verizon, and a $117.5 million authorized settlement in 2019. |
| Spear phishing |
Sony Footage Leisure (2014) | The hack started in retaliation for the discharge of The Interview, a comedy about assassinating North Korea’s chief. | Precipitated important disruption, huge knowledge leaks, reputational injury, monetary losses, and government resignations. Practically half of the 6,800 private computer systems and over half of its 1,555 servers had been worn out or destroyed. |
| Enterprise e mail compromise (BEC) | Fb and Google (2013–2015) | Impersonated Quanta Laptop Inc., tricking staff into wiring funds through faux invoices that appeared like professional enterprise transactions. | Fb was defrauded of $99 million, whereas Google misplaced roughly $23 million. |
| Whaling | Levitas Capital (2020) | The co-founder clicked a faux Zoom hyperlink, permitting attackers to entry programs and provoke fraudulent wire transfers whereas posing as executives. | $800,00 monetary loss, shut down because of reputational injury. |
| Smishing |
Twilio (2022 & 2024) | Attackers impersonated Twilio’s IT division, sending SMS messages about password expiration containing a hyperlink to faux login pages mimicking Twilio’s sign-in portal. | Compromised worker credentials allowed unauthorized entry to the inner system and buyer knowledge. |
| Vishing | UK-based power agency (2019) | An AI-generated voice mimicking the agency’s German father or mother firm CEO was used to trick the UK CEO into transferring $243,000 to a faux Hungarian provider. | $243,000 misplaced, and important reputational injury. |
| Pharming | 50 monetary establishments (2011) | Subtle pharming marketing campaign contaminated desktops, redirecting customers to faux web sites. | Contaminated 1000 desktops day by day for almost 3 days; main reputational injury. |
| HTTPS phishing | Change Healthcare (2024) | Attackers used HTTPS on faux websites to seem professional, aiding credential theft. | 190M PHI information compromised, $22 million ransom paid through bitcoin. |
| Clone phishing |
Ubiquiti Networks Inc. (2015) | Attackers crafted emails that mimicked professional inner messages from executives, directing finance employees to hold out wire transfers. The emails appeared genuine, seemingly utilizing a spoofed or lookalike area. | $46.7 million was stolen. Ubiquiti recovered $8.1 million, with one other $6.8 million legally frozen. Over $31.8 million remained unrecovered. Public disclosure broken fame and belief. |
| Social media phishing |
Meta (Fb, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger (2021) | Attackers arrange 39,000 + faux web sites that cloned Meta’s login pages and tricked customers into getting into credentials. | Account takeovers, identification theft dangers, and broad social media privateness and safety compromises. |
| QR code phishing | Normal public within the UK (2024) | Fraudulent QR codes had been positioned in public locations (parking meters, menus), redirecting customers to malicious websites or apps. | Victims suffered monetary losses, together with unauthorized subscriptions and potential identification theft. |
| Malvertising | Lowe’s staff | Faux web sites mimicking Lowe’s worker portal, delivered by malicious Google adverts, to steal worker credentials and gross sales knowledge. | Worker credentials compromised, knowledge seemingly bought to cybercriminals, breach disguised as a glitch. |
The most typical phishing assaults: Actual examples and surprising stats
There are several types of phishing assaults, and understanding these may help you keep away from falling for them.
1. E-mail phishing
Topping the record, an estimated 3.4 billion phishing emails are despatched every day throughout the globe. Cybercriminals use e mail phishing to impersonate professional corporations or fake to be somebody acquainted, tricking victims into offering their login particulars.
Yahoo knowledge breaches: Resulting in a $117.5 million settlement
Between 2012 and 2016, Yahoo skilled huge knowledge breaches that compromised over 3 billion person accounts, making it one of the important breaches in historical past. Attackers stole delicate person info, together with names, e mail addresses, cellphone numbers, birthdates, and passwords.
The breaches went undisclosed for years, permitting cyber criminals to take advantage of the info extensively. In 2017, Yahoo publicly confirmed the extent of the violations, which severely broken its fame and led to a big discount within the firm’s acquisition worth by Verizon. The authorized fallout culminated in a $117.5 million settlement in 2019 to compensate affected customers.
Associated: Including layers like DomainKeys Recognized Mail (DKIM) can considerably block phishing on the supply.
2. Spear phishing
Spear phishing is a focused e mail despatched to particular folks to trick them into sharing non-public info. Out of fifty billion analyzed throughout 3.5 million mailboxes, Barracuda researchers uncovered solely 0.1% as spear-phishing emails. Regardless of being uncommon, spear-phishing assaults trigger important hurt once they succeed.
The Sony Footage Leisure hack: 47,000 SSNs leaked
In 2014, Sony Footage was hit by an enormous cyberattack. Hackers known as themselves the Guardians of Peace and broke into Sony’s pc programs. The hackers infiltrated Sony’s programs utilizing a spear phishing marketing campaign, stealing terabytes of delicate knowledge, together with 47,000 Social Safety Numbers, government emails, and confidential worker information. The hacker’s principal objective was to cease Sony from releasing a comedy film known as “The Interview”, which made gentle of North Korea’s chief.
The breach crippled Sony’s operations: almost half of 6,800 private computer systems and over half of its 1,555 servers had been worn out or destroyed, and the corporate confronted appreciable embarrassment and belief points. Sony needed to delay the film’s launch, which price them tens of hundreds of thousands of {dollars} in monetary losses. In addition they spent rather a lot fixing their safety and coping with lawsuits from staff whose private knowledge was leaked. The hack confirmed how weak large corporations might be to cyberattacks.
3. Enterprise e mail compromise (BEC)
BEC is a rip-off during which unhealthy actors hack or faux an organization e mail account, normally of a boss or trusted worker, to trick others into sending cash or delicate info. This type of fraud induced $2.8 billion in reported losses within the U.S. alone in 2024.
The Fb and Google bill rip-off: Over $100 million loss
Between 2013 and 2015, a Lithuanian named Evaldas Rimasauskas ran a complicated, large-scale rip-off that tricked Fb and Google out of over $100 million. He arrange a faux firm in Latvia that mimicked Quanta Laptop, a professional {hardware} vendor with which each corporations did enterprise. The attacker despatched faux invoices and emails and satisfied Fb’s and Google’s staff to pay for items and providers that the attackers by no means delivered.
The rip-off exploited belief in vendor relationships and the corporate’s cost processes. Google misplaced about $23 million, and Fb misplaced round $98 million. Rimasauskas was extradited to the U.S., the place he pleaded responsible to wire fraud in 2019 and agreed to forfeit $49.7 million. He faces as much as 30 years in jail.
4. Whaling
Whaling is a phishing assault geared toward high-profile targets like CEOs or high executives. It’s also a sort of BEC assault concentrating on high-level executives comparable to CEOs, CFOs, or administrators. These assaults rely closely on superior social engineering methods, utilizing extremely customized and convincing emails to trick leaders into authorizing massive funds or sharing delicate info. Whereas BEC can goal any worker inside an organization, whaling particularly focuses on high executives, rising the stakes and potential injury.
In 2021, one in each 3,226 emails obtained by an government was a whaling assault, and 59% of organizations reported that at the least one government had been focused.
The Levitas Capital collapse: Shut down because of monetary and reputational injury
In 2020, Australian hedge fund Levitas Capital was hit by a whaling assault that led to its closure. The assault began when a co-founder clicked a faux Zoom hyperlink, which put in malware and gave attackers entry to the agency’s e mail system. Then, they posed as executives and approved fraudulent transactions, inflicting a lack of about $800,000.
The monetary injury, together with the lack of their largest shopper, compelled the agency to close down because of reputational injury.
5. SMS phishing
Smishing, or SMS phishing, is a sort of phishing performed by textual content messages to steal info or cash. A zLabs Mishing Report reveals that India is probably the most weak to smishing, with 37% of its inhabitants in danger, adopted by the U.S. at 16% and Brazil at 9%.
Twilio breach: 33 million cellphone numbers stolen
In August 2022, Twilio, a significant cloud communications firm, was hit by a social engineering assault. Hackers tricked some Twilio staff and gained entry to delicate inner programs, permitting the attackers to steal knowledge about Twilio’s clients. Due to this breach, attackers accessed info from at the least 125 Twilio clients, inflicting critical knowledge safety and privateness considerations.
In 2024, Twilio was breached once more by a hacker group known as ShinyHunters, who claimed to have stolen 33 million cellphone numbers from Twilio’s system. This later breach was a lot greater in scale. The 2022 assault revealed vulnerabilities in worker safety coaching and inner controls.
6. Vishing
Vishing, or voice phishing, is a rip-off during which attackers use cellphone or voice calls to trick folks into gifting away delicate info. In 2022, phishing was the second most typical trigger of knowledge breaches, costing organizations a median of $4.91 million in breach bills.
2019 UK-based power firm rip-off: $243,000 stolen through deepfake voicecall
In 2019, a UK-based power firm fell sufferer to a extremely subtle cyberattack that used synthetic intelligence to clone a CEO’s voice. Criminals used AI-powered voice-generating software program to impersonate the chief government of the corporate’s German father or mother agency, efficiently convincing the UK CEO to urgently switch $243,000 to a fraudulent provider account in Hungary.
The scammers mimicked the German CEO’s accent and tone so precisely that the UK government believed the decision was actual. The attackers known as thrice, even following up with faux reassurances and requesting a second cost. Suspicion was raised solely after inconsistencies within the caller’s quantity and the promised reimbursement didn’t arrive. Consultants warned that conventional safety instruments will not be geared up to detect AI-generated audio, and as AI know-how turns into extra accessible, the chance of such assaults is rising.
7. Pharming
Pharming assaults redirect folks from an actual web site to a faux one to steal their info with out their data. They will have an effect on everybody, from particular person customers to massive organizations, by hijacking DNS providers or infecting many gadgets to redirect victims to faux web sites.
In 2021, the FBI’s Web Crime Criticism Heart (IC3) reported 323,972 incidents beneath the mixed phishing/Vishing/Smishing/Pharming class, making it the top-reported cybercrime kind that 12 months.
World pharming assault: Over 50 banks focused
In 2007, cybercriminals launched a complicated pharming assault that focused clients of greater than 50 main monetary establishments worldwide, together with banks like Barclays, Financial institution of Scotland, PayPal, and American Categorical. As an alternative of counting on conventional phishing emails, this assault redirected customers from professional banking web sites to fraudulent replicas with out their data. The attackers deployed malware that contaminated victims’ computer systems, silently redirecting them to faux banking websites designed to steal login credentials.
The assault affected 1000’s of customers every day, with infections estimated at round 1000 PCs per day throughout its peak. Though the total monetary affect was by no means publicly disclosed, this large-scale pharming marketing campaign demonstrated the evolving ways of cybercriminals past traditional phishing. It highlighted the necessity for stronger endpoint safety and DNS safety.
8. HTTPS phishing
Hypertext Switch Protocol Safe (HTTPS) phishing makes use of SSL/TLS certificates to make faux phishing websites seem professional. The SSL certificates is projected to develop from $234.5 million in 2025 to $518.4 million by 2032, with a powerful compound annual progress price of 12% from 2025 to 2032.
Change Healthcare HTTPS assault: 190 million folks affected
In February 2024, Change Healthcare suffered a significant ransomware assault by the ALPH/Blackcat group, which started with stolen credentials seemingly obtained by an HTTPS phishing assault. This breach uncovered the non-public well being info of 190 million folks, disrupting healthcare billing, insurance coverage claims, and pharmacy providers nationwide for weeks. UnitedHealth CEO Andrew Witty later confirmed the corporate paid a $22 million ransom in bitcoin to guard private info and mitigate additional injury.
9. Clone phishing
Hackers resend an actual, beforehand delivered e mail however change a hyperlink or attachment with a faux one to trick staff into clicking and gifting away information or downloading malware.
Ubiquiti Networks wire switch rip-off: $46.7 million in misplaced cyber heist
In 2015, networking firm Ubiquiti Networks fell sufferer to a big cyber heist during which attackers stole $46.7 million utilizing a sort of rip-off often called CEO fraud. The attackers impersonated senior executives and despatched faux emails to the corporate’s finance division, tricking staff into sending wire transfers to abroad accounts. The San Jose–based mostly firm found the fraud in June 2015 and reported it in a monetary submitting.
The rip-off focused a Ubiquiti subsidiary in Hong Kong, the place funds had been transferred to third-party accounts in different international locations. Ubiquiti recovered $8.1 million rapidly and positioned authorized holds on one other $6.8 million, however greater than $31 million remained unrecovered. The corporate stated there was no proof that its inner programs had been hacked or that staff had been concerned, but it surely admitted that its monetary controls had been weak on the time. The attackers seemingly used a faux e mail area resembling Ubiquiti’s area title, a standard trick in CEO fraud.
10. Social media phishing
Billions of individuals scroll by platforms like Fb, Instagram, Snapchat, and LinkedIn to attach with folks, sharing the whole lot from getting new canines to getting new job promotions. This makes the scammers’ job simpler when creating convincing scams. Assaults concentrating on social media platforms accounted for 22.5% of all cyberattacks in This fall 2023, down from 30.5% within the earlier quarter, displaying a lower on this menace vector.
Fb’s 2021 authorized crackdown: 39,000 faux logins created
In 2021, Fb (now Meta) took authorized motion towards a large-scale phishing operation that focused hundreds of thousands of customers throughout its platforms, together with Fb, Instagram, WhatsApp, and Messenger. Attackers created over 39,000 faux login web sites to steal customers’ credentials by impersonating professional social media providers. These phishing websites had been distributed extensively by emails, social media messages, and posts, tricking numerous customers into getting into their usernames and passwords.
Meta’s lawsuit aimed to close down the infrastructure supporting this huge sharpening marketing campaign and maintain the perpetrators accountable. The operation highlighted the rising sophistication and scale of phishing assaults concentrating on social media customers and underscored the significance of coordinated authorized and technical efforts to guard on-line communities.
11. Quishing
Quishing is a QR code-based phishing assault. In 2023, Barracuda discovered that about one in twenty e mail inboxes was focused with malicious QR Codes, displaying how attackers even use QR scans to trick customers.
The 2024 UK quishing assault story: Reportedly, 1386 folks affected
In 2024, organized crime teams within the UK launched a widespread quishing assault. They positioned fraudulent QR codes on on a regular basis public indicators like parking meters and restaurant menus. When folks scanned these faux QR codes, they had been taken to malicious web sites or apps designed to steal their private and monetary info. In response to the UK’s nationwide fraud reporting heart, Motion Fraud, it obtained 1,386 reviews of individuals being focused in 2024, a dramatic enhance from simply 100 circumstances in 2019. This displays how attackers are adapting outdated scams to new know-how.
Many victims ended up with unauthorized subscriptions and even confronted dangers of identification theft. This intelligent rip-off focused most people and induced important financial hurt. It highlighted how attackers use new, on a regular basis applied sciences like QR codes to trick folks unexpectedly.
12. Malvertising
Malvertising is when malware or malicious code is hidden inside on-line adverts. Within the fall of 2023, cybersecurity companies reported a big 42% month-over-month spike in malvertising incidents throughout the U.S.
Lowe’s malvertising rip-off: Workers focused in a Google advert phishing rip-off
In mid-August 2024, attackers launched a complicated phishing scheme concentrating on Lowe’s staff. They created a number of faux web sites resembling the official “MyLowe’sLife” worker portal, disguised as odd retail websites. These web sites had been seemingly generated utilizing AI to keep away from elevating suspicion.
The rip-off labored by exploiting person belief in search outcomes. Workers who looked for “myloweslife” noticed a number of faux adverts that appeared above or alongside the professional website. Clicking one among these led to a phishing web page to steal usernames and passwords, probably giving attackers entry to delicate employment and payroll knowledge. After capturing the info, the faux website redirected customers to the true Lowe’s portal, making the incident seem like a easy glitch.
Researchers recognized two separate advertiser accounts impersonating the MyLowesLife portal. In a single case, they noticed three malicious adverts showing back-to-back. Many staff did not notice that attackers had compromised their delicate credentials and had been seemingly promoting them to different cybercriminals.
Phishing clues you’ll want you knew sooner
Validate earlier than you click on. Report suspicious exercise.
- Test the e-mail tackle to see if it precisely matches the alleged sender. Scammers usually use addresses nearly an identical to professional ones however comprise refined typos or additional characters (instance: Amaz0n as an alternative of Amazon).
- Phishing messages usually strain you with warnings like “your account shall be suspended!” or “Instant motion required!” designed to hurry you right into a mistake.
- Official corporations don’t ask for delicate knowledge through e mail. Watch out for password requests, social safety numbers, bank card particulars, or verification codes are pink flags.
- Be cautious of generic greetings, comparable to “Pricey Buyer/Pricey Sir/Madam”.
- Be cautious of unknown recordsdata, particularly if they’re executable (.exe, .zip, .scr).
- Hover the mouse over the connected hyperlinks to test the URL. If the URL appears suspicious, do not click on.
- Take a second to evaluate the e-mail/SMS earlier than taking any actions.
- Use organizations’ designated strategies to report phishing makes an attempt.
- To remain knowledgeable, often overview info on frequent phishing assaults. Attackers always evolve their ways, so common updates on frequent scams enhance your consciousness.
If it smells fishy, simply do not click on
From a traditional textual content message to a QR code in a public place, it simply takes one second of distraction to get tricked. Most cybercrime is just not as high-tech because it sounds. Simply belief that tiny voice in your head saying “uhh.. this feels bizarre” — that intestine really feel is likely to be the perfect cybersecurity software you’ve got. The extra knowledgeable an individual is, the more durable they’re to deceive them.
From phishing to ransomware, cyberthreats are rising throughout the board. Try our record of important cybercrime statistics each enterprise ought to know.
