Cluttered: Almost half of all emails are spam messages

Phishing remains dangerous

The current figures for 2025 illustrate the problem. In total, according to the report, home and business users received more than 144 million malicious and potentially unwanted email attachments; this corresponds to an increase of 15 percent compared to 2024.

“Email phishing should not be underestimated. One in ten attacks on companies begins with phishing; a large proportion of these are advanced, persistent threats,” comments Roman Dedenok, anti-spam expert at Kaspersky.

In 2025, increasing sophistication in targeted email attacks was observed. Even the smallest details are carefully worked out in these campaigns – from the design of the sender addresses to the targeted adaptation of the content to real company events and internal processes.

Asia-Pacific region ahead

According to Kaspersky, the region with the highest share of email antivirus detections (30 percent) was Asia Pacific, followed by Europe (21 percent). Behind them are Latin America (16 percent) and the Middle East (15 percent), as well as Russia and the CIS (twelve percent) and Africa (six percent).

The topic of artificial intelligence (AI) is also moving into focus. Dedenok: “The widespread availability of generative AI has significantly increased the threat, allowing attackers to create compelling, personalized phishing messages at scale with minimal effort by automatically tailoring tone, language and context to individual targets.”

WhatsApp, Telegram and Co

The trend also remains for attackers to entice email users to shift communication to messenger services or to call fraudulent phone numbers. For example, they tried to redirect recipients to fake websites that asked them to provide their contact details. A telephone contact follows.

In 2025, WhatsApp and Telegram accounts were among the most common targets of phishing and fraud attacks. Among other things, fraudsters tried to take over WhatsApp accounts by asking users to vote in supposed children’s competitions. These fake voting sites were also observed in German.