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How to spot an AI-powered phishing attempt
AI can help attackers produce polished, convincing messages, but polished writing is not evidence that a message is legitimate. NIST’s small-business phishing guidance, updated August 19, 2025, recommends extra scrutiny when a message asks you to click a link, download a file, transfer funds, log in, or submit sensitive information. Focus on the request and whether you can verify it—not on guessing who or what wrote the message.
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- Check the action: Is the message asking you to open a link or attachment, provide credentials or financial information, or make a payment?
- Check the pressure: Does it insist that you act immediately, threaten a consequence, or discourage you from checking with someone else?
- Check the identity: Look beyond the display name. An unexpected or suspicious sender address is a warning sign, but a familiar-looking name alone does not verify who sent the message.
- Check the context: Were you expecting this request, and does it fit the normal process? Treat an unexpected request from a boss, supplier, or service provider as unverified until you check it.
For an urgent or high-impact request, contact the person or organization through details you already trust, such as a known phone number or the company’s public website. Do not use a phone number, reply address, or link supplied in the suspicious message to verify it. No validated general-purpose test is established in the cited guidance for determining whether a particular message was written by AI.
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Apply the same checks beyond email
Phishing can arrive by text message, phone call, social media, or physical mail as well as email. Independently verify identity and intent before following an unexpected request through any of these channels.
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What to do with a suspicious message you haven’t acted on
- Stop: Don’t reply, click a link, open an attachment, or use an unsubscribe link in the message.
- Report it: Use your organization’s established phishing-reporting channel, if you have one. Reporting lets the organization assess the message and any related exposure.
- Delete it after reporting: Follow your organization’s process for handling the original message and any evidence it asks you to retain.
For phishing crimes, NIST also points individuals to the FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3). Use that channel where appropriate; it does not replace notifying an employer or other affected organization.
If you clicked, downloaded, shared information, or sent money
Report what happened promptly to the appropriate people in your organization and follow its incident-response plan. Be specific about what you did and when: for example, whether you opened a link or file, entered a password, or approved a payment. That information helps responders assess what accounts, devices, or transactions may be affected.
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If you entered a password
- Change the affected password as soon as possible, if you can still access the account.
- Change it on any other account where you reused it, and use a unique, strong password for each account.
- Notify the organization responsible for the account so it can assess whether further action is needed.
If a financial account or payment was involved
Contact the financial institution’s fraud department if its account may have been compromised, and monitor the account for unauthorized transactions. Report a transfer or payment to your organization promptly as well.
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Tell your organization what you downloaded or disclosed and which device or data may be involved. At the organizational level, assess whether customer, supplier, or other personal data was exposed; determine applicable notification obligations and notify affected parties as appropriate. Technical actions such as isolating a device, removing messages from mailboxes, or revoking account sessions depend on the evidence, systems, and organization’s policy, so follow the response plan rather than assuming one universal sequence.
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How an organization should contain and investigate the incident
Handle a suspected phishing incident through the organization’s incident-response process, not as an isolated email-cleanup task. NIST Special Publication 800-61 Revision 3, published in April 2025, is the final revision and supersedes Revision 2 from 2012. It places incident response throughout cybersecurity risk management and aligns its recommendations with the NIST Cybersecurity Framework (CSF) 2.0.
- Assign incident leadership: Identify who is coordinating the response and who needs to be involved, such as security, IT, account owners, and relevant business leaders.
- Collect initial reports and evidence: Gather what recipients observed and what actions they took, along with relevant message and system information under the organization’s evidence-handling procedures.
- Assess potential scope: Determine which people, accounts, devices, systems, and transactions may be affected. Revisit that assessment as new information arrives.
- Investigate the route and control gaps: Examine the message and consider whether email filtering, identity controls, or another process failed to prevent or detect the incident. Establish root cause before deciding which corrective actions are warranted.
- Coordinate containment and recovery: Use the incident plan to select technical actions appropriate to the evidence and systems involved, then reassess scope and response as the investigation develops.
A CISA tabletop exercise involving an email-filter system asks organizations to consider employee reporting, collection of incident information, investigation leadership, and root-cause analysis. Those are useful elements to exercise, but a tabletop scenario is not a universal technical playbook.
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How to reduce the risk of future phishing
Use overlapping safeguards: no single control guarantees that every phishing message will be stopped. NIST recommends employee awareness and reporting, configurable email filters, email-authentication technologies, and multifactor authentication (MFA), with phishing-resistant MFA as the stronger option.
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- Sender authentication: Configure technologies that help verify message origin and reject spoofed messages. CISA guidance identifies DMARC, SPF, and DKIM in this context.
- Phishing-resistant MFA: Prefer phishing-resistant authentication where it is supported. CISA’s guidance identifies FIDO authentication; check that any method you adopt is compatible with the organization’s accounts and devices.
- Awareness and reporting: Teach people how to assess high-impact requests and make reporting suspicious messages easy. A fast, usable reporting path is part of the response system.
- Incident readiness: Maintain and exercise a response plan that covers reporting, leadership, evidence collection, investigation, containment, and recovery.
NIST’s Phish Scale Technical Note 2276 helps awareness-training practitioners rate how difficult an email is for people to detect as phishing. It can help calibrate training scenarios; it is not a test for AI authorship. CISA announced its JCDC AI Cybersecurity Collaboration Playbook and Fact Sheet on January 14, 2025, describing voluntary information-sharing processes for AI-related cyber risks, incidents, and vulnerabilities. Organizations can consider relevant information-sharing channels as part of their own response and information-sharing processes.
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