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When you open your email platform, one thing it surely doesn’t scream of is “danger”. But over the years, what began as a primary channel for communication across individuals, businesses, and governments has become an open invitation for abuse.
Today, spam emails have grown from being just a nuisance to becoming an entry point for fraud, extortion, espionage, and economic disruption. Email-based attacks are now more personal, more convincing, and more likely to succeed.
According to VIPRE’s Q1 2025 Email Threat Trends Report, what makes them so dangerous is not their technical complexity, but their ability to trick people. The United States has become both the top sender and recipient of these malicious campaigns. VIPRE’s data shows that 57% of global spam originated from US infrastructure, and a staggering 75% of the world’s malicious emails ended up in American inboxes.
We look at what new tricks are helping threat actors weaponize the email system, and how to catch them.
Key Takeaways
- Email attacks in 2025 are increasingly targeting human behavior rather than relying on technical exploits.
- Over 90% of emails analyzed in Q1 2025 were spam, and most of these had malicious intent.
- Callback phishing and Business Email Compromise (BEC) are on the rise, using persuasion instead of payloads.
- Attackers are abandoning HTML files in favor of more trusted formats like PDFs and SVGs to bypass detection.
- The US is both the top source and recipient of global spam due to its vast internet infrastructure.
- Generative AI is being used to create more convincing phishing emails, making detection even harder.
More Spam With Less Code
A recent scan of over 1.45 billion emails in the first quarter of 2025 by cybersecurity company VIPRE revealed that about 92% were spam. Nearly 70% of those spam emails carried malicious intent, such as phishing, scams, or malware.
That scale of threat is not isolated when you consider that SlashNext’s report recorded a 202% rise in email-based attacks in 2024 alone.
VIPRE’s findings show that this wave of malicious email is no longer built around complex payloads, but instead focuses on manipulating the minds of recipients.
Perhaps the most striking trend in the report is the quick rise in callback phishing. These types of emails avoid typical flags like bad links or corrupted PDF attachments.
Instead, they ask users to call a support number to dispute a charge or cancel a subscription. Once the call is made, the scammer uses social engineering techniques, often tied to urgency, authority, and familiarity, to extract sensitive data or walk the caller through an action like installing remote-access software.
Unlike malicious links or attachments, these scams often evade detection because they leave no digital trail in the email itself.
The Psychology Behind the Click
During my time as a master’s student in a cybersecurity and human factors program, one lesson kept resurfacing, quietly at first, then louder with every case study and breach report I studied.
No matter how advanced the systems, no matter how tightly controlled the protocols, it was always the human element that unraveled it all. People, not code, were the most consistent point of failure in cybersecurity, and threat actors know that.
This, again, proved to be the case in VIPRE’s findings. Their latest report showed that 37% of all scam emails involved Business Email Compromise, which often exploits the way people think and act under pressure.
The attacks typically target CEOs and CFOs, with scammers sending brief, informal messages that mimic everyday requests, often for urgent wire transfers or sensitive documents. Because the tone feels familiar, employees tend to respond quickly and without question.
Ilia Badeev, Head of Data Science at Trevolution Group, explained why hacking the human mind is now an easier target for attackers than hacking security checkpoints.
He told Techopedia:
“When security tools are well-configured and vulnerabilities are patched, it’s no longer the tech that’s being hacked – it’s the people. Every employee becomes a potential point of entry, and unlike code, humans aren’t consistently predictable or updatable.”
The FBI has long flagged BEC as one of the costliest forms of cybercrime. And that trend is accelerating with Hoxhunt estimates showing that BEC scams caused $4.7 billion in losses in the first quarter of 2025 alone.
Generative AI is exacerbating this issue, according to VIPRE’s report. It revealed that GenAI enables the creation of spam emails that are grammatically flawless, emotionally sophisticated, and contextually convincing.
SVG Files Are Preferred to PDFs in New Spam Trick
Another growing threat is the use of SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) files as malware carriers, according to VIPRE’s email analysis.
While PDFs remain the most common attachment type in malicious emails, forming up to 36% of samples, SVGs are not far off at 34%. Attackers embed malicious scripts inside the image files, which redirect users to phishing websites when opened. Because SVGs are generally viewed as harmless visuals, they often slip past email security tools.
This shift is part of a broader migration away from HTML attachments. Two years ago, 88% of malware spam included HTML, but today, that figure has dropped to 12%, the VIPRE report claims.
“I think the shift was probably brought on due to improved email scanning,” Benjamin Lopez, Lead Security Specialist at Bona Fide Conglomerate, told Techopedia.
“HTML formatting likely led to major decreases in open rates. Basically, scammers’ targets were leaving them ‘unread,’ so they tested and launched new approaches,” he explained.
When it comes to industries targeted, manufacturing remains the hardest hit. It accounted for 36% of all email attacks in Q1 2025, followed by retail and financial services, each with 15%.
The Defense Gap & What Needs to Be Done
Security tools are evolving, but not fast enough to outpace attackers who’ve stopped trying to out-code systems and are now outsmarting people instead.
Most traditional solutions still scan for known malware, links, and payloads, but many modern phishing campaigns contain none of those. Rather, they manipulate human behavior with precision-crafted persuasion.
This is why organizations must now shift their cybersecurity strategy to address the behavioral layer – the habits, assumptions, and blind spots of the people using the tools. That means going beyond annual compliance training. It means building a culture where employees feel safe reporting suspicious messages, even when they appear to come from leadership.
In addition, companies must pair that culture shift with adaptive, context-aware security tools that look beyond file types and scan for anomalies in communication patterns.
As Dr. Venkata Naga Ravi Kiran Nizampatnam, network security engineer, puts it:
“The best tools available cannot trap the best lies coming from the mailbox of a genuine email. This keeps social engineering as one of the deadliest and most enduring threats we see today.”
The Bottom Line
Email attacks in 2025 are shaped less by technical breakthroughs and more by behavioral manipulation. What makes them succeed is timing, tone, and trust. Defenders who still rely on outdated training modules or static scanning tools are playing catch-up in a game that has already changed.
Email security today means understanding people, as well as building solutions that can read tone shifts, spot unfamiliar patterns, and adapt quickly.
