KnowBe4 Research Reveals That Fake Internal Emails Dominate Phishing Simulation Clicks

KnowBe4 today released its Q2 2025 Simulated Phishing Roundup report. The roundup highlights a continued trend of employee susceptibility to social engineering techniques that exploit familiarity and trust, as seen in dominant interactions with internal communications and well-known brands, making up 98% of top email subject lines. All data for this roundup was taken from the KnowBe4 HRM+ platform between April 1, 2025, and June 30, 2025. 

Key Findings from the Roundup Report: 

  • Consistency with Previous Quarter
    • Phishing simulation trends remained largely consistent with Q1 2025 (January 1 – March 31, 2025).
  • Internal Topics Dominate
    • Internal-themed topics made up 98.4% of the top 10 most-clicked email templates.
    • Among these, HR was cited in 42.5% of phishing failures and IT in 21.5%.
  • Branded Landing Pages
    • 71.9% of malicious landing page interactions involved branded content.
    • Microsoft was the most common, accounting for 26.7%, followed by LinkedIn, X, Okta, and Amazon.
  • Top Clicked Hyperlinks
    • 80.6% of the top 20 clicked links came from internally-themed simulations.
    • 68.2% of these used domain spoofing techniques.
  • Attachment Interactions
    • PDF attachment clicks rose by 8.1% compared to Q1.
    • PDFs comprised 61.1% of the top 20 attachments, followed by HTML files (20.9%) and Word documents (18.0%).

Download a copy of the Q2 2025 KnowBe4 Simulated Phishing Roundup report, here. 

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