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AI Now Drives 86% of Phishing, KnowBe4 Says

More convincing lures now land far more hits, pushing a shift to identity‑first defense.

Overview

  • KnowBe4’s latest Phishing Threat Trends report finds that 86% of campaigns in the past six months used AI, marking a further rise from prior years.
  • Attackers are moving beyond email into calendar invites and workplace chat, with a 49% jump in calendar‑invite lures and a 41% rise in Microsoft Teams impersonation attempts.
  • Use of reverse proxies to steal Microsoft 365 logins surged 139%, as these look‑alike gateways sit between a user and the real site to capture credentials and session tokens.
  • Microsoft reports AI‑crafted lures are 4.5 times more effective than human‑written ones, and FBI data shows US cybercrime losses hit $20.87 billion last year with about $893 million tied to AI‑related fraud.
  • Industry voices urge defenses that watch behavior and protect identities, including continuous leak monitoring and Zero Trust access, so a stolen password cannot unlock broad systems.