Phishing Attack Statistics 2026: What SMBs Need to Know

Phishing remains the most common cyberattack vector in 2026 — and small to mid-sized businesses are bearing the brunt of it. While headlines focus on breaches at major corporations, the reality is that SMBs face a disproportionate share of phishing attacks relative to their resources. They're easier to target, slower to detect attacks, and less equipped to recover.

Understanding the current landscape isn't just academic. The numbers tell a story about where the threats are, how they're evolving, and what your business needs to prioritise to stay protected. Here are the phishing statistics that matter most in 2026.

The Scale of Phishing in 2026

Phishing isn't shrinking — it's accelerating. Here's where things stand:

• 3.4 billion phishing emails are sent globally every day, according to Valimail's email authentication research. That's roughly 1.2% of all email traffic.
• Phishing accounts for 36% of all data breaches, making it the single most common initial attack vector, per Verizon's Data Breach Investigations Report.
• The number of unique phishing sites detected has grown 65% since 2023, driven by the availability of AI-powered phishing kits and automated domain registration tools.
• Over 300,000 new phishing URLs are detected every month by Google Safe Browsing — and those are just the ones that get flagged.

The sheer volume means that even businesses with solid email filters will see phishing attempts slip through. The question isn't whether your brand will be used in a phishing attack — it's when you'll find out about it.

SMBs Are the Primary Target

There's a persistent misconception that phishing attacks predominantly target large enterprises. The data tells a different story:

• 61% of SMBs experienced a phishing attack in the past 12 months, according to the Hiscox Cyber Readiness Report.
• Businesses with fewer than 250 employees receive the highest rate of targeted phishing emails — 1 in every 323 emails, compared to 1 in 823 for larger organisations (Symantec).
• 46% of all cyberattacks target businesses with fewer than 1,000 employees (Verizon DBIR).
• Only 14% of SMBs rate their ability to mitigate cyber threats as "highly effective" (Accenture).

Why are SMBs targeted disproportionately? Three reasons: they hold valuable data (customer records, payment information, credentials), they typically lack dedicated security teams, and they're less likely to have the monitoring tools that would catch phishing attacks early.

The Financial Impact

The cost of a successful phishing attack goes far beyond the immediate fraud. Here's what the numbers look like:

• The average cost of a phishing attack for an SMB is $120,000 — encompassing direct financial loss, remediation, downtime, and customer churn (Proofpoint).
• Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks — a targeted form of phishing — caused $2.9 billion in reported losses in 2025 in the US alone (FBI IC3).
• 60% of small businesses that suffer a significant cyber attack go out of business within six months (National Cyber Security Alliance).
• The average time to identify and contain a phishing breach is 295 days (IBM Cost of a Data Breach Report) — nearly 10 months of exposure before the problem is resolved.

For context, the true cost of brand impersonation extends beyond direct financial loss to include customer trust erosion, legal liability, regulatory fines, and long-term reputation damage. The $120,000 average likely understates the real impact.

Brand Impersonation: The Growing Phishing Vector

An increasingly dominant phishing tactic in 2026 is brand impersonation — where attackers register lookalike domains and create convincing replicas of legitimate business communications.

• Brand impersonation accounts for 51% of all phishing attacks — surpassing generic phishing for the first time (Cloudflare).
• 83% of phishing sites now use HTTPS, making the "look for the padlock" advice essentially useless (APWG).
• The median time from domain registration to first phishing email is under 48 hours — attackers move fast once they've secured a lookalike domain.
• 71% of brand impersonation domains use combosquatting (appending words like "-login", "-support", or "-billing" to a brand name), making them appear like legitimate service subdomains (Georgia Tech).

This trend is particularly dangerous because the phishing happens entirely outside your infrastructure. The attacker registers a domain, hosts a fake site, and sends emails — all without touching your systems. Your first indication is usually a confused customer asking why they received a suspicious invoice from "your company."

AI-Powered Phishing: The 2026 Accelerant

The emergence of generative AI has fundamentally changed the phishing landscape:

• AI-generated phishing emails have a 60% higher click-through rate than traditionally crafted ones (SlashNext) — they're grammatically flawless, contextually relevant, and harder to distinguish from legitimate communications.
• The cost of launching a phishing campaign has dropped by approximately 95% since 2022, thanks to AI tools that automate email generation, website cloning, and even victim targeting.
• AI-powered voice phishing (vishing) is emerging as a new threat, with tools capable of cloning a CEO's voice from publicly available recordings and using it in real-time calls.
• Automated phishing-as-a-service platforms now offer complete attack infrastructure — domains, hosting, email templates, and credential harvesting — for as little as $50/month on dark web marketplaces.

The democratisation of phishing tools means that attacks are no longer limited to sophisticated threat actors. Anyone with minimal technical skill can now launch convincing, targeted campaigns at scale.

Industry-Specific Phishing Trends

Not all industries face equal risk. Here's where phishing attacks concentrate in 2026:

• Financial services: 27% of all phishing attacks target banks, fintech, and payment processors — the highest of any sector
• E-commerce and retail: 19% — driven by fake order confirmations, delivery notifications, and payment pages
• SaaS and technology: 16% — login page impersonation for credential harvesting is the primary vector
• Healthcare: 12% — patient portal phishing and insurance fraud
• Professional services: 9% — invoice fraud and client impersonation targeting law firms, accountancies, and consultancies

If your business operates in any of these sectors, you're facing above-average phishing risk. But even businesses outside these categories are targeted — any brand with customers, partners, or an online presence is fair game.

What These Numbers Mean for Your Business

The statistics paint a clear picture: phishing is a volume game, SMBs are in the crosshairs, and the attacks are getting cheaper, faster, and more convincing. Here's what that translates to in practical terms:

1. Email Filtering Isn't Enough

Modern email security catches most phishing — but "most" isn't good enough when billions of phishing emails are sent daily. Even a 99.9% filter rate means thousands of malicious emails get through. And brand impersonation phishing that targets your customers happens entirely outside your email infrastructure.

2. You Need External Visibility

The biggest gap in most SMB security postures isn't their firewall or endpoint protection — it's visibility into what's happening outside their perimeter. Lookalike domains, fake websites, and impersonation emails all exist on infrastructure you don't control. You need tools that monitor the external domain landscape to catch these threats.

3. Speed of Detection Determines Impact

With a median time of under 48 hours from domain registration to first phishing email, every hour of detection delay increases the number of potential victims. Automated monitoring that alerts you in real time can be the difference between catching a threat before it launches and discovering it after your customers have been defrauded.

How DoppelDown Helps SMBs Fight Back

DoppelDown exists because the statistics above shouldn't be a death sentence for small businesses. Enterprise companies have dedicated brand protection teams and six-figure security budgets. SMBs deserve the same level of protection at a price they can actually afford.

• Real-time domain monitoring that catches lookalike registrations before they're weaponised
• Intelligent risk scoring that separates genuine threats from benign registrations, so you don't waste time on false alarms
• Instant alerts that give you the head start needed to act before phishing campaigns reach your customers
• Affordable pricing designed for SMBs — because brand protection shouldn't require an enterprise budget. See our pricing plans

Don't Become a Statistic

The numbers are stark, but they're not inevitable. The businesses that avoid becoming phishing statistics share one trait: they don't wait to be attacked. They invest in visibility, monitor their brand presence across the domain landscape, and catch threats before they reach customers.

Start monitoring your brand with DoppelDown today — it's free, requires no credit card, and takes less than five minutes. Because in 2026, the cost of not knowing is too high.