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How AI and phishing-as-a-service are changing the email threat landscape

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How AI and phishing-as-a-service are changing the email threat landscape Insights from Barracuda’s 2026 Email Threats Report Takeaways - Email threats are increasingly focused on deception and identity compromise, with phishing representing nearly half of malicious email activity. - Attackers are shifting away from traditional file-based malware toward URLs, QR codes and HTML, where threats can be...
The Barracuda report presents a compelling narrative about the escalating sophistication of email threats, driven by AI and phishing-as-a-service. At its strongest, the analysis highlights tangible shifts in attacker tactics—such as the rise of QR codes and HTML-based lures—backed by concrete statistics. The emphasis on phishing-as-a-service as an industrialized threat model is particularly noteworthy, as it reframes cybercrime as a scalable, low-barrier enterprise. This aligns with broader tren...