Email is still the most popular communication channel for business, marketing, customer service, and internal coordination... and a favorite target for threat actors trying to lure employees or customers to phishing sites.
Of course, visually appealing email designs, clear branding, and recipient-friendly layouts matter if you want your email campaigns to perform well, but if you ignore email security, you could end up losing thousands of dollars for nothing.
In this article, we’ll reveal the top 10 email security stats. They’re not intended to scare you but to warn you about risks so you can protect your emails from phishing attacks.
Top 10 email security statistics
These phishing statistics show why protecting your emails from phishing remains as important as designing them well.
- Email as the primary attack vector for phishing attacks: In 2026, 90% of phishing attacks began with email (CompareCheapSSL).
- Financial losses from BEC: Business email compromise (BEC) phishing attacks increased by 13% in early 2025. Of these recent phishing attacks, 62% targeted transfers between $10,000 and $50,000 (KnowBe4).
- More advanced fraud tactics: Forty-seven percent of phishing emails bypassed standard filters, indicating that threat actors are defeating many defenses with their phishing kits (SQ Magazine).
- The rise of AI-powered phishing attacks: In 2025, 82.6% of phishing emails included AI-generated content (KnowBe4).
- Successful attacks inside organizations: In 2025, 73% of organizations reported at least one successful phishing attack (SQ Magazine).
- Human element and phishing attempts: More than 80% of email‑related phishing breaches are due to human error (CompareCheapSSL).
- Spam and malicious traffic: In 2025, 44.99% of global email traffic was spam, and recipients encountered over 144 million malicious attachments (Kaspersky).
- Daily volume of phishing emails: More than 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent every day (SLL Insights).
- Weak email automation leading to phishing attacks: Only 18.2% of the top 10 million domains have valid DMARC records, and just 7.6% enforce them (Fortra).
- Cost of data breaches: In 2025, the average cost of a global email-related security breach reached $4.44 million (DeepStrike).
Email is one of the most widely used channels for phishing attacks in modern organizations. Phishing, spoofing, QR code phishing, voice phishing triggered by email, business email compromise (BEC), and other targeted attacks continue to evolve.
Email security isn’t just an IT issue anymore; it affects your reputation, your customers’ trust, and your revenue.
Different security measures apply to different types of attacks. For example, established security standards, such as SPF (Sender Policy Framework), DKIM (DomainKeys Identified Mail), and DMARC, help protect your domain from impersonation. Callback verification procedures can prevent voice phishing; user awareness training can help thwart QR code phishing, among other methods.
The cost of poor email security
Without a reliable security system to block malicious emails, you face financial losses, huge recovery expenses after spear phishing or QR-code phishing emails, regulatory fines (estimated at €5.88 billion in 2025), reputational damage, and increased customer churn.
Business email compromise and financial risk
Business email compromise (BEC) is a type of social engineering fraud that can occur across multiple channels. This fraud also involves phishing emails in marketing, whereby fraudsters impersonate executives, suppliers, or trusted partners to trick employees into transferring money or sharing sensitive data through phishing emails. BEC phishing attacks pose serious financial risks for organizations.
In 2024 alone, BEC scams caused close to $2.7 billion in losses, and each incident involved phishing emails that the companies failed to block in time. What’s most frightening is that 83 % of financial losses from BEC phishing attacks are unrecoverable.
Email security in eCommerce and customer protection
Phishing attacks and email spoofing pose a serious threat to eCommerce brands, resulting in increased customer abandonment. In 2025, 50.58% of phishing campaigns, including BEC attacks, targeted online stores. Organizations must prioritize email security to protect their customers from phishing attacks and maintain their trust.
Important email security measures that businesses often overlook
When your brand underestimates email security, you leave gaps for phishing attacks and risk, at least, having stolen credentials. Commonly overlooked measures include multifactor authentication (MFA), two-factor authentication (2FA), a lack of phishing simulation training, the absence of email monitoring tools, and inconsistent reporting of phishing incidents.
Working in the Stripo email editor, you can activate 2FA or MFA to protect your account from various phishing attempts and social engineering attacks, including spear phishing, brute force phishing attacks, and credential phishing. You can find lots of useful information about using security protocols for email newsletters on our blog.
Employee behavior and human risk in email security
Many phishing emails with malicious messages reach their targets due to human error. People click on malicious links that lead to phishing websites (the average click-through rate on phishing URLs without training exceeds 25%), use weak passwords, and ignore suspicious phishing emails.
To protect your organization and clients from phishing attacks through phishing links and phishing attachments in emails, implement threat awareness programs, and provide continuous security monitoring.
Email authentication, compliance, and monitoring
Three main email security standards help organizations protect their domains from security incidents and phishing attacks.
DMARC is a standard that helps combat certain types of phishing emails, primarily spoofing. It allows a domain to publish a policy for what receiving mail servers should do when SPF or DKIM checks fail and provide reporting.
SPF specifies which servers can send emails on behalf of a domain (authentication).
Another standard is DKIM, which ensures that emails are signed and unchanged (authentication and compliance).
By the way, misconfigured SPF and DKIM affect 30 % of domains, increasing the risk of phishing emails.
Future email security and phishing trends
Phishing attempts, from ransomware attacks to QR code phishing and targeted CEO fraud, are becoming more sophisticated. That’s why successful companies invest so much in tools that detect emails leading to fake sites and train employees to recognize various phishing attacks.
- AI‑driven phishing attacks are rising sharply: AI-generated phishing emails achieve roughly 4.5 times higher click-through rates, making spear phishing campaigns more effective;
- deepfake email fraud is emerging: Threat actors use AI-generated synthetic content to create spear phishing attacks with impersonation scams;
- zero-trust email framework adoption is growing: Organizations are implementing strict identity verification (SPF, DKIM, DMARC), scanning links/attachments (ATP, sandboxing), using secure email gateways, monitoring in real time with email security tools, and training employees (MFA, phishing simulations) to prevent phishing attacks;
- the cloud-based email security market is expanding: Investment in cloud email protection grows annually to address sophisticated cyberattacks. The cloud market is projected to reach $1.73 billion by 2031.
What the latest phishing statistics mean for businesses
As the number of phishing attacks has surged in recent years, proactive email protection is no longer just an option. Organizations that implement SPF, DKIM, and DMARC can block up to 90% of phishing emails, reducing risks from spear phishing, QR code phishing, BEC risks, credential phishing, and other cyberattacks. Companies can also use resources from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) and turn to security teams to lower the risk of email threats.
To prevent phishing attempts, start by training your employees. Without security awareness training, the average phishing email click rate exceeds 25 %, whereas continuous education can reduce it to below 5%.
Along with effective security awareness training, ensure you have automation and monitoring to prevent email-based phishing attacks. Modern organizations that value customer trust use real-time alerts and automated detection to recognize phishing attempts. With advanced email security solutions, companies can lower their exposure to cyber threats by up to 66 %.
Wrapping up
As the sophistication of spear phishing attacks and credential theft grows, businesses should increase their budgets for email security and security awareness training.
If email is your brand’s face, security is its shield. Email should help you build strong relationships with customers and not become a threat to them or a source of unnecessary expenses.
If you want to create high-performing and secure email marketing campaigns, sign in today!