EDUCATION RESOURCES

Phishing Email Examples

Phishing is a type of social engineering cyberattack in which cybercriminals impersonate a legitimate company or individual using a fraudulent email to steal sensitive data or install malware on a user’s device.

Phishing email examples help you identify the actual threats. Malicious messages are structured to resemble real emails. Most of them demand urgent action (such as reset passwords, confirm personal data, etc.) or contain unsolicited attachments. However, highly targeted phishing attacks are hard to identify.

The best way to keep your employees safe from phishing attacks is to educate them on the different types of malicious emails. Also, guide your team members on how to analyze each email structure to recognize anything suspicious.

Here are some phishing email examples to guide you.

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The Anatomy of a Phishing Email

Before we show some phishing email examples, some data: a recent survey from GreatHorn points out that users fail to identify nearly half of phishing attacks. This happens because employees lack cybersecurity awareness and because cybercriminals do their job in creating highly customized emails that resemble real ones. The following characteristics are common in malicious emails:

Unusual sender

Unexpected or unsolicited attachments and files

'Too good to be true' kind of offers or requests

Poor spelling and grammar

Urgent or threatening requests with a sense of urgency

Non-personalized messages

Common requested actions in Phishing Emails

To install malware or steal sensitive data from users, attackers incite victims to execute malicious actions, which can vary from providing log-in information to installing an infected file. Here are a few examples of frequently requested actions incorporated in a phishing email. We’ll show these on our phishing email examples.