Topic starter
27/06/2026 1:55 pm
TL;DR: Generative AI has accelerated targeted phishing and business email compromise, while Gartner’s 2025 Email Security Magic Quadrant places Abnormal AI as a Leader for the second year and highest in Completeness of Vision among 14 vendors. The real issue is not vendor ranking but that email security now has to keep pace with machine-speed deception and broader collaboration-tool attack surfaces.
Editorial analysis by NHI Mgmt Group, based on content published by Abnormal AI: “Abnormal AI Named a Leader in the 2025 Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Email Security”.
Key questions
Q: How should security teams handle AI-generated phishing that looks like normal business mail?
A: They should treat it as a trust problem across identity and workflow, not only as an email-filtering problem.
Q: Why do social engineering attacks spread so easily across collaboration tools and email?
A: They work because these platforms are trusted for routine business interaction, which lowers user suspicion and helps attackers blend malicious messages into normal workflows.
Q: What are the signs that traditional email security is failing against AI-driven threats?
A: Common failure signs include malicious emails reaching inboxes despite known scam patterns, phishing that reads like normal internal correspondence, and controls that depend too heavily on static rules or known signatures.
Practitioner guidance
- Map social-engineering trust paths Identify which email and collaboration workflows rely on relationship trust, delegated approval, or informal verification so those paths can be monitored as identity-bearing channels.
- Tune detections for behavioural anomalies Prioritise sender-pattern changes, reply-chain irregularities, and unusual request timing over static content rules that attackers can now generate at scale.
- Extend governance beyond the inbox Bring chat, shared files, and delegated collaboration features into the same monitoring and response model you use for email.
Bottom line: Generative AI is making phishing and BEC faster, more convincing, and harder to catch with static email controls alone.
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This topic was modified 3 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group
27/06/2026 3:26 pm
AI-driven social engineering is now an identity governance problem, not only a content problem. Email security that focuses on message characteristics alone misses the way attackers exploit trust relationships, sender history, and business context. The article reflects a market in which detection has to reason about who should be trusted, not just what should be blocked. The practitioner implication is that email controls and identity controls need to be managed as one trust system.
A question worth separating out:
Q: How do organisations balance layered email security with overlapping vendors?
A: They should define which trust paths each control owns, where one vendor covers detection and another covers response or adjacent channels, and where duplicated coverage adds value versus noise. The objective is not vendor count, but clear coverage of the full social-engineering path.
👉 Read our full editorial: Email security is being reshaped by AI-driven social engineering
This post was modified 3 days ago by NHI Mgmt Group