What Is Phishing?
Phishing is a common social engineering cyber attack that uses deceptive communication, generally in the form of emails, to manipulate individuals into divulging sensitive information or performing actions that benefit the threat actors. Attackers often disguise themselves as trustworthy individuals through emails, text messages, phone calls, or websites to steal credentials, financial data, and personal information.
Phishing remains one of the most effective and pervasive methods cybercriminals use to breach organisations, serving as one of the most often used entry points for ransomware, business email compromise (BEC), and data theft.
Where Does “Phishing” Come From?
The term “phishing” emerged in the mid-1990s when attackers began using fraudulent emails to “fish” for sensitive information from unsuspecting victims. Since then, phishing has evolved from crude, easily identifiable scams into sophisticated operations that leverage artificial intelligence, social media intelligence, and psychological manipulation.
According to the Arctic Wolf 2025 Threat Report, phishing accounted for almost 73% of all business email compromise incident response (IR) cases, demonstrating its continued effectiveness despite decades of security awareness efforts.
How Do Phishing Attacks Work?
Phishing attacks follow a structured approach designed to exploit human psychology and organisational vulnerabilities. Attackers begin by gathering intelligence about their targets through open-source research, social media profiles, corporate websites, and data from previous breaches. This reconnaissance phase allows them to craft messages that appear both authentic and relevant to the recipient.
The attack itself typically involves sending communications that create a sense of urgency, fear, curiosity, or trust.
Common Phishing Pretexts
- Password reset notifications,
- Invoice payments,
- Executive requests, security alerts
- Shipping confirmations
These messages will often then include links to fake websites designed to harvest credentials, or attachments that deploy malware when opened.
Modern phishing campaigns have become remarkably sophisticated. Large language models (LLMS) now enable attackers to generate convincing emails in any language, free from grammatical errors and unnatural phrasing that once served as telltale signs. AI-powered tools can also analyse human writing styles to impersonate specific individuals, making spear phishing attempts increasingly difficult to detect.
What Are the Types of Phishing Attacks?
Phishing Emails
Email phishing, easily the most common and effective type of modern phishing, involves mass campaigns that may be sent to thousands of recipients with generic messages. While individual success rates may be low, the volume compensates through sheer numbers. These attacks often impersonate well-known brands, financial institutions, or government agencies to establish false credibility.
Spear Phishing
Spear phishing represents a more targeted approach where attackers customise messages for specific individuals or organisations. These campaigns leverage detailed research about the target’s role, relationships, recent activities, and interests to craft highly personalised and convincing communications. The time investment in spear phishing pays off with higher success rates and more valuable compromises.
Whaling
Whaling attacks focus exclusively on senior executives, high-level decision makers, or privileged accounts that have access to sensitive data and financial resources. These sophisticated operations often combine multiple communication channels and may include phone calls (vishing) to reinforce the legitimacy of fraudulent requests. The potential payoff from compromising a single executive justifies the extensive preparation these attacks require.
Business Email Compromise (BEC)
Business email compromise (BEC) represents a particularly damaging phishing variant where attackers either compromise legitimate email accounts or convincingly impersonate trusted contacts. According to the Arctic Wolf 2025 Threat Report, BEC was the second most common incident for the year, with incidents accounting for 27% of all IR cases. These schemes often result in significant financial losses through fraudulent wire transfers and data exfiltration.
Smishing
Smishing uses text messages to deliver phishing attempts, often leveraging the immediacy and trust associated with SMS communications, while Voice voice phishing (vishing) employs phone calls where attackers impersonate IT support, bank representatives, or government officials. These multichannel approaches may increase success rates by moving targets away from their typical security-conscious email environment.
What Are the Warning Signs of Phishing?
Despite increasing sophistication, phishing attempts often exhibit identifiable characteristics. Urgent or threatening language designed to provoke immediate action without careful consideration represents a common red flag. Legitimate organisations rarely demand sensitive information through unsolicited communications or threaten account closure without prior notification through official channels.
Sender address spoofing also remains prevalent, with attackers using domains that closely resemble legitimate ones through subtle character substitutions or modifications, such as the modification of “Arctic Wolf” to “Artic Wolf” or “Arctic W0lf”. Examining the full sender address rather than just the display name reveals these deceptions. Hovering over links before clicking also exposes destination URLs that may differ from the displayed text.
Generic greetings and impersonal language is another method of spotting mass phishing campaigns, though sophisticated spear phishing attempts may include accurate personalisation. Unexpected attachments, especially executable files or documents enabling macros, warrant suspicion. Requests for sensitive information that legitimate entities would never solicit through email further signals potential phishing attempts.
What Are the Business Impacts and Consequences of Phishing?
Phishing attacks impose substantial costs on organisations beyond immediate financial losses. According to the Arctic Wolf 2025 Trends Report, 35% of organisations experienced business email compromise attacks in 2024, resulting in productivity losses lasting three months or longer for most affected companies. The cascading effects include operational disruption, data breach notification costs, regulatory fines, and reputational damage.
Credential theft is another common risk of phishing, enabling threat actors to maintain persistent access to corporate systems, conduct further reconnaissance, escalate privileges, move laterally across networks, and establish backdoors for future exploitation. These compromised credentials may also fuel subsequent attacks including ransomware deployment, intellectual property theft, and supply chain compromises.
In our research we’ve identified that phishing is a threat that targets multiple verticals, each with their own challenges or risk. The financial services sector faces disproportionate phishing risks due to the direct monetary incentives attackers pursue, while healthcare organisations encounter regulatory consequences when patient data becomes compromised. Manufacturing and technology firms see risk arise from intellectual property theft that undermines competitive advantage. Every industry confronts the challenge of maintaining stakeholder trust after publicised security incidents.
Phishing Defense Strategies and Phishing Prevention
Effective phishing defense requires layered technical controls combined with supportive organisational culture of security and routine user awareness training. Email security solutions that employ the latest threat intelligence strategies and machine learning can identify suspicious patterns, analyse sender behavior, detect credential harvesting attempts, and sandbox potentially malicious attachments before they are delivered to user inboxes.
Multi-factor authentication, when used correctly, can provide critical protection even when credentials become compromised through phishing. Phishing-resistant MFA methods using biometrics, hardware tokens, or certificate-based authentication offer stronger security than legacy SMS codes, which remain vulnerable to interception. Organisations should prioritise MFA best practices for all accounts accessing sensitive systems and data.
Effective security awareness training must evolve beyond annual compliance exercises, to instead become ongoing, engaging education that reflects modern threat landscapes. When this training is paired with simulated phishing exercise, security teams can identify vulnerable users and provide immediate teachable moments. Training should also emphasise reporting suspicious communications to security teams rather than attempting independent verification, creating organisational detection mechanisms that benefit everyone.
Real-World Phishing Scenario
Consider a finance department employee who receives an email appearing to come from their organisation’s CEO. The message references a legitimate ongoing acquisition that has been reported in the press, lending credibility to the communication. The CEO’s supposed message expresses urgency about completing a confidential wire transfer before the market closes for the day, emphasising that the finance employee initiate the transaction immediately.
The email includes the CEO’s correct name, title, and email signature formatting. However, closer examination reveals the sender domain uses a subtle misspelling of the company name. The request bypasses normal approval workflows and payment verification procedures. The artificial urgency and confidentiality claims are designed to prevent the employee from consulting colleagues or following established protocols.
This scenario demonstrates how attackers combine publicly available information, authority manipulation, and psychological pressure to override standard security practices. Organisations that train employees to recognise these tactics, verify unusual requests through approved alternative communication channels, and enforce established workflows significantly reduce susceptibility to such attacks.
How Arctic Wolf Helps
Arctic Wolf® Managed Detection and Response provides 24×7 monitoring and rapid response to phishing attempts before they escalate into breaches. Our Concierge Security® Team works as an extension of your organisation, analysing suspicious emails, investigating potential compromises, and containing threats at machine speed. The Arctic Wolf Aurora™ Platform correlates email security telemetry with endpoint, network, and identity data to detect sophisticated phishing campaigns that bypass traditional email filters.
Arctic Wolf Managed Security Awareness® delivers targeted phishing simulations and training programs that educate users to recognise and report social engineering attempts. Our security awareness approach treats employees as a critical defense layer rather than a weak link, fostering a security-conscious culture throughout your organisation. When phishing attempts do reach users, Arctic Wolf® Incident Response provides elite response capabilities to contain compromises and restore operations quickly, minimising business impact and helping you end cyber risk through comprehensive protection and rapid remediation when threats emerge.
