Cofense Phishing Defense Center (PDC) tracked one malicious email every 42 seconds in 2024. Many of these were part of polymorphic phishing attacks.

Cofense Phishing Defense Center (PDC) tracked one malicious email every 42 seconds in 2024. Many of these were part of polymorphic phishing attacks.

The global average baseline PPP before training was 33.1%. This means approximately one-third of employees interact with phishing simulations before undergoing best-practice security awareness training.

From 2024 to 2025, the general trend of around one-third of employees clicking on a simulated phishing link before training remained fairly consistent.

Organizations with 10,000+ employees showed a global baseline PPP of 40.5%.

Organizations with 1-250 employees had a global baseline PPP of 24.6%.

After 12 months of security training, the global Phish-prone™ Percentage (PPP) dropped to 4.1%.

Across different regions, the highest baseline PPPs were found in South America (39.1%), North America (37.1%), and Australia and New Zealand (36.8%).

The global PPP fell by a total of 86% after 12 months of ongoing security training.

Security training reduces global phishing click rates by 86%.

After implementing phishing training, the global PPP fell by 40% in just three months.

In organizations of 1,000-9,999 employees, three sectors achieved PPP improvement rates of 91% after 12 months of ongoing training: Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals, Hospitality, and Legal.

Globally, the top three most at-risk industries with the highest baseline PPP were Healthcare & Pharmaceuticals (41.9%), Insurance (39.2%), and Retail & Wholesale (36.5%).

There has been a 3.5% decrease in the global baseline PPP within a year (from 2024 to 2025), highlighting a positive shift in overall security awareness worldwide.

59% of financial professionals cite SMS and phishing scams powered by AI to deceive victims.

Top concerns for CIOs regarding cybersecurity risk include: Malware and ransomware (42%), data breaches (37%), AI-driven attacks (34%), and phishing (33%).

AI-driven attacks now occur as frequently as phishing, placing AI firmly among the top three cybersecurity threats.

In attachment-based campaigns, people were most likely to open certain file types: PDFs (53%), HTML files (28.5%), Word files (18.5%).

Smishing has rapidly grown to comprise over two-thirds of mobile phishing attacks. Specifically, SMS/text based phishing (Smishing) is now 69.3% of all mishing attacks.

68.6% of clicked links involved domain spoofing.