There has been a 341% increase in malicious emails in just the past six months, according to new research from SlashNext.

The company’s State of Phishing 2024 Mid-Year Assessment found that over the past 12 months, malicious emails have increased by 856%.

Interestingly, the company also tracked the increase in malicious emails since the launch of ChatGPT on 30 November 2022, a staggering 4151%. The stark figure suggests that the threat landscape has been remarkably transformed by the introduction of ChatGPT.

Generative AI becoming available on a mass scale has enabled threat actors to usher in a new era of sophistication, allowing for more advanced BEC attacks, and refined social engineering tactics.

But the report also shows significant threat factors from credential phishing, business email compromise (BEC), and trusted services attacks as part of this trend.

As well, 11% of phishing were QR-based, showing how prolific the newer method is in the evolving threat landscape.

Text-based BEC attacks rose 29% since the start of 2024, and 45% of all reported mobile threats were ‘smishing,’ a form of phishing that uses text messages.

Credential phishing, however, was the number one access point for breaches, increasing 217% from October 2023 to March 2024.

Another threat on the rise in CAPTCHA-based attacks, where threat-actors manipulate CAPTCHA bot checks which are meant to prevent fake accounts, spam, and automated bots.

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Attackers exploit this by generating thousands of domains and using CAPTCHAs to hide credentials phishing forms from security protocols that are unable to bypass the CAPTCHAs.

To hide phishing and malware, cyber-criminals are still relying on tried and trued domains to maintain an increased level of anonymity.

Microsoft Sharepoint, AWS, Salesforce, and other large service vendors are the most popular platforms to host phishing malware, according to the report.