AI-generated phishing is rapidly reshaping email risk, with more attacks slipping past filters and landing directly in users’ inboxes, even though AI-generated emails remain a minority of total phishing.
The human element remains central: 68% of breaches involve people, and 80–95% of those begin with phishing, making social engineering the dominant breach vector.
Phishing volume has exploded since generative AI went mainstream, with reports attributing a more than 4,000% increase in phishing activity to tools like ChatGPT and similar large language models.
These models generate fluent, localized, context-aware emails at scale, stripping away the spelling mistakes and awkward phrasing users were trained to distrust.
At the same time, the economic incentive is huge: the average phishing-related breach now costs around 4.88 million dollars, representing the largest year‑over‑year jump in breach cost since the pandemic.
gbhackers.com
