How Phishing Attacks Are Evolving With AI And Deepfakes In 2025

Are phishing attacks still a major threat in 2025?
And how have these attacks changed now that artificial intelligence is involved?

Phishing attacks have evolved in recent years by leveraging artificial intelligence (AI), deepfake technology, and more sophisticated spoofing tactics that bypass traditional security tools like multi-factor authentication.

The rapidly shifting threat landscape has caught many businesses off-guard. Many organizations aren’t prepared to handle growing treats because of limited cybersecurity resources.

This lack of preparation has directly led to a steady occurrence of phishing attacks in recent years. In fact, phishing attacks are now considered the leading and most common type of cyber threat.

In this article, we’ll define what a phishing attack is and discuss some recent examples. We’ll also provide effective tips on how to spot them and avoid becoming the next phishing scam victim.

After reading this article, you’ll learn some key cybersecurity tools that can help protect your business and sensitive information.

With this information, you’ll be able to develop an effective cybersecurity strategy to keep your business up and running smoothly and securely.

What Is Phishing?

While the term phishing has been around for the past 30 years, the concept is as old as time—using deception to scam businesses (and individuals) out of their money and valuable information.

In basic terms, phishing is a modern-day scam in which virtual fraudsters use different schemes to pretend to be trusted individuals known to the victims. Once they have established trust, the cybercriminals then convince their targets to reveal usernames and passwords, disclose bank details or personal information, or to send money.

Learn More: What Is An Adversary-in-the-Middle (AiTM) Phishing Attack?

Or, bad actors may take a different tact by trying to bait individuals into taking some other adverse action, like clicking on a malicious link or downloading an infected file that could then be used to launch a larger cyberattack.

What Are The Most Common Types Of Phishing?

Email phishing remains the most common type of phishing.

A recent study by Astra Security found that nearly 1.2 percent of all emails sent are malicious, translating to 3.4 billion phishing emails each day.

The report, State of Continuous Pentesting 2025, a ransomware or phishing attack occurred every 11 seconds. In addition, the study found that an estimated 33 million records were exposed or extorted.

Besides email phishing, some other commonly used phishing variations include:

• Smishing: sending fake SMS texts
• Vishing: sending fake voicemails
• Spear phishing: sending fraudulent emails impersonating individuals within an organization to build trust
• Quishing: QR code phishing
• Whaling: a specific type of business email compromise (BEC) targeting company executives
• Pharming: uses malicious code and spoofing to redirect to malicious websites
• Angler phishing: social media phishing

How Have Phishing Attacks Evolved In Recent Years?

The difference between phishing attacks of today and the ones of old is that today’s scammers are using highly sophisticated tools that harness AI. Those tools include a rotating bag of tricks, including fraudulent emails, texts, voicemails, and websites.

Fraudsters have even become more adept at launching deepfakes—fake video, audio, or images in which a person’s body or face is altered to appear to say or do something that the individual did not actually say or do.

Learn More: What are the pros and cons of AI in cybersecurity?

These advanced tools allow them to carry out these highly convincing and often nearly undetectable schemes in such a convincing way that even trained IT professionals at global enterprise companies have been fooled.

While phishing initially relied mostly on instant messaging, today’s phishing attempts use a long list of tactics to cast a wider of potential targets.

Attackers are using increasingly stealth methods such as token theft and spoofing (including website spoofing and email spoofing) to bypass existing security controls like multi-factor authentication (MFA).

This allows them to steal user credentials and possibly spread the attack to others within an organization’s circle of contacts, including employees, partners, subcontractors, suppliers, and vendors.

Many organizations have started to ramp up adoption of AI tools within their businesses, but have been slow to establish needed security controls to help mitigate risks from using the technology, according to IBM’s 2025 Cost of a Data Breach annual report.

The IBM study found that 13 percent of organizations reported breaches of AI models or applications, while another 8 percent of respondents said they didn’t know if they had been compromised in this way.

Of those compromised, 97 percent had not implemented AI access controls. This lack of preparation resulted in 60 percent of the AI-related security incidents leading to compromised data and 31 percent causing operational disruption, IBM’s report found.

Often working in large cyber gangs, threat actors today are willing to go to extreme lengths to get to ensnare their newest victims.

They often plot and scheme for days, weeks, and even months to compile background information on their intended targets gathered from their social media posts and other readily available information online.

Once they’re able to gain a foothold into your network, cybercriminals can snoop around your systems and databases, view emails, gather information about your contacts, and analyze user behavior.

They can then use this information to launch a larger cyberattack, such as malware, ransomware, or a data breach.

These attacks can come in the form of a zero day attack. Zero day attacks exploit undetected security flaws within hardware or software that the manufacturers haven’t had a chance to send security patches to fix, leaving users with no advance warning or time to prepare.

How Often Are SMBs The Targets Of Phishing Attacks?

Because of the increasingly convincing nature of the deepfakes and other tools being used in today’s phishing attacks, the number of such incidents has been on the rise.

This has led to staggering financial loss, operational and supply chain disruptions, reputational damage, and even legal consequences for some affected businesses.

Nearly 83 percent of phishing emails are AI-generated, according to KnowBe4’s 2025 Phishing Trends Threat Report.

Despite admitting to being aware of growing cyber risks, many small and medium-sized businesses are still woefully unprepared in the event of a major cyber incident, such as a ransomware or malware attack.

Financial losses from phishing hit $17.4 billion in 2024 globally, representing a 45 percent year-over-year increase, according to NordVPN.

In 2024, phishing and spoofing were the most frequently reported types of cyber crime, with approximately 200,000 incidents filed with the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3).

Some of the factors that make SMBs prime phishing attack targets include:

1. Lack of employee cybersecurity awareness training

Employees are the first and primary line of defense against ever-evolving cyber threats. So, it’s vital that you provide regular, ongoing cybersecurity awareness training to educate your team about new and emerging threats, clues to watch for, and best practices to avoid falling victim to one of the many deceptive traps.

2. Limited resources

SMBs with limited financial and staff resources may be at increased risk of lurking cyber threats because of deferred implementation of strong cybersecurity controls as well as deferred system and device maintenance.

Businesses may be grappling with a lack of internal IT staff with the specialized skills and knowledge to ensure that you have the right security controls in place to mitigate risk and satisfy regulatory requirements.

3. Lack of robust cybersecurity tools

Despite knowing about the rising incidence of cyberattacks, many SMBs have not taken steps to strengthen their cybersecurity defenses.

This means they haven’t put in strong security measures like multi-factor authentication, access controls, data encryption, next-generation firewalls, and network segmentation.

4. Inadequate cybersecurity planning

Some businesses have also failed to develop and implement an incident response plan.

Such planning is critical so that your team knows how to respond in the event of a significant cyber incident so you can limit any downtime and get back to normal as quickly as possible.

5. Legacy equipment and software

Although many SMB manufacturers may have state-of-the-art machinery to produce the parts or products for use by the federal government, many continue to use legacy IT.

Hardware and software that has reached its end of life or end of support means those devices or software applications are no longer receiving updates and critical security patches from the manufacturer.

This provides yet another opportunity for cybercriminals to exploit a weakness to gain unauthorized access to your systems and sensitive data.

6. Valuable data

Primes and their subcontractors within the DIB have some of the most valuable data around, with some of it related to national security and infrastructure.

What Are Effective Tools Businesses Can Use To Defend Against Phishing?

Delayed breach detection can lead to increased costs, potential fines and penalties for regulatory noncompliance, and even reputational damage.

While there is no foolproof way to prevent phishing attacks, you can take steps to greatly reduce the chances of your organization falling prey.

Here are a few practical tips to keep in mind when viewing emails:

1. Know your sender. Check the name and email address carefully. Are there any transposed letters or numbers? Any strange domain names?
2. Verify before you click. Hover your cursor over any links to make sure they go where you think they’re going by inspecting the domain name.
3. Never click on any link or download an attachment from an unknown sender.
4. Check for incorrect grammar and spelling. Is the body of the email poorly written or use a generic greeting or uncommon greetings.
5. Use caution when any emails call for urgent action to be taken, and find another method to verify the information with the known contact.
6. Be especially wary of any requests for money or personal/confidential information. Again, verify the request outside of the email.
7. Finally, if you see or feel anything unusual or suspicious about an email, you can report it to your internal IT team or managed IT provider for further investigation.

Even though phishing and other forms of hacking are on the rise, they can be defeated with the right tools, training, and awareness.

If you have questions or concerns about your current cybersecurity posture, reach out to us by clicking the button below. We’re here to help you strengthen your defenses, reduce your risk, and protect your business in 2025 and beyond.