A Master Class on the Anatomy of a Modern Phishing Attack

Five layers of a 2026 phish, two studies three years apart, and the tells that replaced the ones you were taught. In October 2022, Osterman Research published a study we commissioned, The Business Cost of Phishing. It created a baseline for us to use as a pulse check on how phishing impacts organizations. A security team spent 27.5 minutes on every phishing email, from first sight to full removal, at a cost of $31.32 per message. Day-to-day phishing consumed one third of the available hours of the IT and security team.

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