Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) platforms have made it easier than ever for cybercriminals to launch high-quality email attacks at scale. With ready-made kits, automation, and real-time support, even low-skilled actors can deploy convincing phishing campaigns that target employees and evade traditional defenses. These services fuel a surge in Business Email Compromise (BEC) scams, driving billions of dollars in global losses. Security teams must now defend against an industrialized threat model that evolves faster than legacy controls can adapt.

Phishing-as-a-Service (PhaaS) has turned email-based attacks into a subscription-based business, making advanced cybercrime accessible to non-technical actors. These platforms offer comprehensive toolkits, including branded phishing templates, hosting infrastructure, credential harvesting dashboards, and in-depth analytics. Payment is handled through cryptocurrency, featuring auto-rotating domains and on-demand hosting to minimize detection.

This model eliminates the technical barriers once required to conduct sophisticated phishing attacks. Criminals can impersonate trusted platforms, such as Microsoft 365, bypass multi-factor authentication (MFA), and track engagement metrics in real-time. Some services specialize in targeted brand spoofing, while others focus on high-volume delivery.

The rapid growth of PhaaS reflects a broader shift toward scalable, commoditized cyber threats that outpace traditional security controls. The five strategies outlined below provide clear, actionable steps to counter PhaaS threats and enhance your organization’s phishing defenses.

Static blocklists cannot keep pace with phishing campaigns that register new domains and rotate infrastructure to evade detection. Rule-based systems react to known threats but often miss Zero-Day tactics that leave no signature behind.

Behavioral AI provides a more adaptive approach. It establishes communication baselines for each user, vendor, and application, then flags deviations in identity, content, or context. This proactive model enables faster identification of threats without waiting for third-party intelligence updates.

API-based detection enables continuous monitoring of Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace environments. It evaluates every message for anomalies in sender behavior, tone, location, and transaction patterns, allowing your team to respond before attacks reach inboxes.

The recommended actions include:

1. Establish behavioral baselines for internal and external communications

2. Deploy API-level detection to assess emails in real time
   Flag deviations in tone or unusual financial requests for automated containment

Replacing static threat intelligence with behavioral AI enables faster, more accurate threat detection tailored to your environment. This shift allows security teams to stay ahead of evolving attacks and respond with precision.

Manual triage of phishing reports quickly becomes unsustainable as organizations face growing volumes of suspicious emails. Traditional processes cannot scale effectively, often resulting in delayed responses and overwhelming security teams.

Automated triage addresses this challenge by organizing reports into prioritized queues that analysts can process efficiently. Structured workflows automatically filter out benign messages, group identical reports to eliminate duplicates, detonate attachments and links in sandbox environments for instant analysis, and escalate only verified threats for further investigation.

An integrated response system can also create cases upon user submission and enable one-click remediation, removing related messages from all affected mailboxes. This reduces manual workload, shortens response times, and allows security teams to focus on detecting new and evolving attack patterns rather than sorting through false positives.

Just-in-time coaching turns each reported phishing email into a timely, personalized learning opportunity, replacing the inefficiencies of traditional annual training. Employees interact with thousands of emails each year, making it essential for security awareness efforts to occur at the moment of engagement, not months later.

This approach delivers instant feedback when a user reports a suspicious message. The system analyzes the email, determines its legitimacy, and provides a concise, targeted lesson that explains what indicators the user correctly identified or missed. Immediate feedback increases retention and improves user behavior more effectively than generic training modules.

To implement this strategy, integrate real-time coaching into your existing email environment, automate verdict delivery with embedded guidance, and monitor engagement metrics such as reporting rates and repeat errors. Tailor lessons by department or risk profile to ensure targeted and relevant education.

This creates a self-reinforcing cycle where users continuously learn from real-world threats, report with greater accuracy, and contribute to a more resilient security posture across the organization.

Remove every trace of a malicious email across Outlook, Teams, and shared mailboxes, before anyone clicks. Attackers weaponize collaboration channels by dropping malicious links into chats and watching them cascade through group conversations, sometimes using automated or custom-built tools to increase the spread. A single credential harvest triggers rapid lateral movement, making user-reported flagging too slow.

You need an organization-wide search-and-destroy playbook that activates the moment a threat is confirmed. API integrations scan historical and live traffic for campaign indicators, reaching every folder including archives and delegated mailboxes. This approach acts instantly when new copies surface.

Once detection fires, you can automate these three steps:

• Retroactive removal: Pull identical emails or chat messages from every mailbox and channel

• Containment: Quarantine affected items, block related domains, and disable malicious sharing links

• Credential reset: Force password changes and re-enroll MFA for any account that interacted with the link

Log each action in your SOAR or SIEM to prove due diligence and refine detection models for future campaigns.

Attackers often exploit non-email platforms to bypass email-only security controls. Communication across Slack, Teams, and Zoom requires the same level of behavioral insight and response capability.

Therefore, it’s essential to use API integrations to provide unified detection across all collaboration tools. Choose a platform that correlates behavior, identity, and content across channels, identifying threats in real time without requiring any changes to mail flow or user behavior. This cross-platform approach strengthens organizational security and accelerates detection and remediation of emerging threats.

API-based deployment eliminates the need for MX record changes, enabling rapid integration without altering mail flow. Unified detection spans email, Slack, Teams, and Zoom, providing consistent visibility across communication channels. A centralized response framework streamlines investigation and remediation, while behind-the-scenes protection ensures users experience no disruption to their workflows.

Abnormal uses behavioral AI to detect and block advanced phishing threats, including those launched through Phishing-as-a-Service platforms. By analyzing identity, behavior, and content across your environment, Abnormal identifies suspicious activity that traditional tools overlook before it reaches your inbox.

Request a personalized demo to see how Abnormal integrates with your existing mail flow, builds dynamic user behavior baselines, and automatically remediates malicious emails in real time.

Our experts will guide you through live threat detection and address your technical questions, providing a clear understanding of how the platform reduces workload while enhancing protection.