Phishing
Email that manipulates the recipient into clicking, paying, or handing over credentials. Modern phishing is often polished, personalized, and free of obvious red flags.
Spear phishing
Phishing aimed at one specific person, using details about their role, colleagues, or projects to look authentic.
Whaling
Spear phishing aimed at executives — the accounts with the authority to move money and unlock doors.
Business email compromise (BEC)
An attack that abuses business trust rather than malware: a wire request, changed bank details, an urgent favor from “the CEO”. Usually payload-less.
Vendor email compromise (VEC)
BEC through a supplier: attackers compromise (or imitate) a vendor you already trust, then redirect a real payment flow.
Account takeover (ATO)
An attacker controlling a legitimate mailbox. Every technical signal looks right — only the behavior is wrong.
Impersonation
Pretending to be a trusted person or brand via display names, lookalike domains, or hijacked threads.
Lookalike domain
A domain crafted to pass a glance: rnicrosoft-online.com, workdaay-app.com. One letter is doing all the work.
Thread hijacking
Replying inside a real, existing conversation from a compromised account — inheriting all of its trust.
Payload-less attack
A malicious email with no link and no attachment — just a request. Nothing for a scanner to detonate; everything for context analysis to catch.
Quishing
Phishing via QR code: the malicious URL hides in an image, out of reach of link scanners — and gets opened on an unmanaged phone.
Credential harvesting
Fake sign-in pages that collect usernames, passwords, and MFA codes — the raw material for account takeover.
AI-generated phishing
Lures written by language models: fluent, personalized, error-free, and produced at scale. Kills the “bad grammar” heuristic for good.
Campaign
One attack, many copies: the same lure pattern landing across dozens or thousands of mailboxes, often mutated to evade signatures.
Graymail
Mail that isn’t malicious but nobody wants — newsletters, cold outreach, notification noise that buries real threats.