Cybercriminals are continuously using new strategies to get past email security gateways, with brand impersonation being used in 83 percent of spear-phishing attacks, while 1 in 3 business email compromise attacks are launched from Gmail accounts.

Sextortion scams, a form of blackmail that makes up 10 percent of all spear-phishing attacks, continue to increase. Employees are also twice as likely to be the target of blackmail than business email compromise.

These are the key findings from a report with the title Spear Phishing: Top Threats and Trends released by Barracuda. Researchers evaluated more than 360,000 spear-phishing emails in a three-month period, identifying and analyzing three major types of attacks: brand impersonation, business email compromise, and blackmail.