Why a Falling Cost-Per-Phish Should Worry You | IRONSCALES

**Executive summary:** The Osterman Research-backed analysis argues the apparent drop in average cost-per-phish (from $31.32 to $27.51) is driven by more organizations moving into faster-response buckets rather than cheaper individual responses; per-bucket costs have actually risen due to higher labor rates and AI-enabled phishing volume has increased, so total spending on phishing rose even as minutes per incident fell, and organizations should track their own end-to-end handling time and phishing volume instead of benchmarking solely to the average.