AI Drives Doubling of Phishing Attacks in a Year

Cofense’s 2025 report, “The New Era of Phishing,” finds phishing detections accelerated to one every 19 seconds (over double 2024), driven by threat actors’ use of AI to scale, personalize, and polymorph operations; it highlights growth in conversational/BEC lures, device- and browser-tailored payloads, high URL uniqueness, a 105% surge in legitimate/malicious RAT usage and automation, a 19x rise in .es domain abuse for credential phishing, and a 204% increase in malware-delivering emails, concluding that post-delivery behavioral analysis and human validation are critical to detect adaptive threats.