Email Attacks Surge 25% in FinServ: How Generative AI is Supercharging Cybercrime in Banking

When a single click can cost millions, cybercriminals don’t need to break in—they just need you to let them in.

That’s the stark reality facing the financial services (FinServ) sector, which has seen a 25.2% spike in advanced email-based attacks over the past year. With financial institutions managing vast sums of capital, personally identifiable information, and mission-critical transactions, the industry is now at the epicenter of a digital crime wave—one increasingly powered by generative AI and social engineering.

Financial Services: A Bullseye for Email-Borne Threats

The recent ransomware breach at Evolve Bank & Trust, affecting more than 7 million individuals and several fintech partners, underscores the magnitude of today’s threat landscape. An employee clicking a malicious link was all it took for attackers—linked to the LockBit group—to exfiltrate sensitive banking data and extort the institution. When the ransom went unpaid, the data was dumped online.

This isn’t an isolated case. Email remains the front door to FinServ infrastructure, and attackers are walking through it with alarming ease.

Why This Sector Can’t Catch a Break

Financial services firms are structurally vulnerable to targeted attacks. Their reliance on email for high-stakes communication—from wire transfers to audit compliance—creates fertile ground for impersonation tactics. Unlike casual phishing aimed at the general public, these campaigns are razor-sharp, mimicking internal lingo and operational workflows with uncanny accuracy.

AI makes that even easier.

Criminals are now using generative AI to mimic internal emails, mirror regulatory jargon, and even replicate leadership communication styles. With just a few publicly available data sources—earnings reports, employee bios, LinkedIn profiles—attackers can build highly persuasive emails that would fool even seasoned employees.

The Growing Threat of Phishing and BEC

According to recent data, phishing attacks on financial institutions jumped 17.1% year-over-year. These aren’t your garden-variety "reset your password" scams. They're hyper-contextual, emotionally manipulative, and designed to blend in.

Take an example from a recent campaign: An email titled “Immediate Compliance Review – Wire Authorization Needed Before Market Close.” It looks like a standard compliance message but contains a poisoned link or malicious attachment. Given the fast-paced nature of financial operations, such a message often triggers immediate action—without verification.

Despite a slight 8.5% decline in business email compromise (BEC) volume, financial firms are still disproportionately targeted. That’s because their organizational structures, regulatory pressure, and transaction urgency make them ideal candidates. As attackers pose as CFOs, chief compliance officers, or regulators, the requests they make—urgent transfers, missing documentation, end-of-day deadlines—sound perfectly plausible.

Attackers Are Exploiting the FinServ Mindset

"In a high-stakes environment where minutes can mean millions, attackers don’t need to hack systems—they just need to mimic routine behavior," said one cybersecurity strategist familiar with recent FinServ incidents.

And mimic they do. AI-driven platforms now scrape language models from public documents, corporate disclosures, and email signatures to synthesize ultra-convincing messages. Security teams report that even trained employees are struggling to distinguish real requests from AI-generated spoofs.

Why Traditional Email Security Just Isn’t Cutting It

Legacy email filters and signature-based detection systems aren’t built to detect messages that exploit human behavior rather than software flaws. The shift toward digital-first finance—accelerated by remote work and cloud infrastructure—has only widened the attack surface.

“Financial services organizations are now digital ecosystems with real-time demands,” said Mike Britton, Chief Information Security Officer at Abnormal AI. “This means attackers no longer need to breach firewalls—they just need to simulate the right email, at the right time, to the right person.”

The Way Forward: Behavior-Based AI Defense

Mitigating these threats will require more than better training or updated spam filters. Financial firms need email security that operates at machine speed—tools that detect behavioral anomalies, model user intent, and flag suspicious patterns before human error enters the equation.

Analysts recommend platforms that incorporate behavioral AI, zero-trust principles, and automated remediation to counter increasingly personalized attacks. These systems can differentiate between a genuine compliance request and a socially engineered decoy, even when they look identical on the surface.

The bottom line: as attackers get smarter, FinServ organizations must evolve from static security policies to dynamic, AI-driven defense.

Because in today’s financial ecosystem, one misread email isn’t just a mistake—it’s a multimillion-dollar catastrophe.