Top 10 Phishing Email Subjects: Q4 2021

Each quarter, KnowBe4 - the world’s largest security awareness training and simulated phishing platform - publishes the top-clicked phishing emails by subject lines. The results come from their millions of users reporting real phishing emails. The subjects are categorized into two different categories: those related to social media, general subjects, and 'In the Wild'.

The first category contains email subjects created by KnowBe4 to test their clients’ security posture. ‘In the Wild’ attacks refer to those email subjects that were real phishing emails and not KnowBe4 templates.

Top Clicked Email Subjects

person holding phone with gmail logo on it

Top 10 Most-Clicked General Email Subjects in Q4 2021:

  1. Password Check Required Immediately

  2. Important: Dress Code Changes

  3. Vacation Policy Update

  4. Important Social Media Policy Change

  5. Employee Discounts on Amazon for your Holiday Shopping

Most Common 'In the Wild' Emails in Q4 2021:

  1. IT: Cloud Enrollment

  2. Special Project Information

  3. You Have Some New Messages

  4. Teams Events

  5. Microsoft: Private Shared Document Received

Key Takeaways

Business, Online Services, and HR-Related Messages Get the Most Clicks

  1. Business phishing emails remain the highest-clicked category around the world. This category contains typical communication that employees might receive. The subjects of these emails include fake invoices, purchase orders, requests for information, shared files, and more.

  2. Online Services includes messages that claim to be from well-known companies and most of the time contain spoofed domains of popular websites within the email copy.

  3. HR-related messages could potentially affect daily work and spoof the users' own domain with an “HR” mailbox name. The common thread is that the emails convey a sense of urgency and entice users to take an action.

See KnowBe4’s original post.


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