VIPRE Security Group recently unveiled its email threat landscape report for the first quarter of 2025. The report showed:
- Cybercriminals are taking the sentiment “work smarter, not harder” to a whole other level with callback phishing scams accounting for 16 percent of phishing attempts. This stands out because link usage, which accounted for 75 percent of phishing attempts in Q1 2024, dropped by 42 percent in Q1 2025, making room for callbacks, which now account for nearly one in five attempts. With email scanning technology now adept at spotting compromised links, cybercriminals are resorting to callback scams via emails that leave no trace at all. Callback phishing is a social engineering attack where victims are tricked into calling a seemingly legitimate phone number through emails or texts to reveal sensitive information or download malware.
- SVG files are fast becoming cybercriminals’ favored types of attachments (34 percent) for phishing attacks, coming a close second to PDF attachments (36 percent). By embedding the ‹ script › tag of an SVG file with a malicious URL, attackers execute JavaScript when the link is opened in a web browser, redirecting the user to a compromised website. In doing so, they bypass anti – phishing defenses.
- The backdoor-type malware, XRed, was responsible for the most malware attacks in Q1 2025, surpassing the second-most prominent malware family (Lumma) by a factor of three. StealC, AgentTesla, and Redline followed.
- HTML attachments took up 12 percent of cybercriminals’ overall malspam strategy. With heightened awareness about the use of malicious HTML attachments, attackers are looking for less obvious methods, preferring PDFs and SVG files instead.
- The manufacturing sector remains the most targeted sector in the email threat landscape, holding its lead at 36 percent vis-à-vis the retail and financial sectors, which tie at second place, with each receiving 15 percent of attackers’ attention.
“There’s a clear shift in cybercriminals’ preference towards low-tech, high-impact, human-centric tactics. This demands a fundamental rethink of email security – one that addresses the human element as vigilantly as the technological,” Usman Choudhary, Chief Product and Technology Officer, VIPRE Security Group, said. “With cybercriminals mastering the art of human deception, and crafting phishing attacks that bypass conventional defenses, email security in turn demands an approach that weaponizes cybercriminals’ own actions and uses their patterns to create a unique, future-proofed response.”
To read the full report, click here.