Inbox AI assistants are now a takeover risk: attackers can scan years of email in minutes

Security experts are starting to flag the built-in email assistants inside mainstream workplace email platforms as a growing account-takeover risk. Their concern is simple: once someone gets into an inbox, chatbot and search features can sift through years of messages and files in a matter of minutes. And because these assistants are already part of workplace email tools, the damage doesn’t stop with email.

Once an inbox is in the wrong hands, an attacker can use the built-in assistant to summarize contracts, pull up finance and payroll threads, identify executives and vendors, and trace how money and data move through the company. From there, they can draft convincing messages in the victim’s own tone, sent from a real internal account. Security experts describe that as a “living off the land” tactic, and they say it’s much harder to catch than old-school phishing.

The wider phishing wave is moving just as quickly. Security experts say generative tools now show up in more than 80% of phishing emails, helping fuel a 1,265% spike in campaigns and driving click-through rates to 54%, compared with 12% for older attacks.

If you’re training staff, the focus has to shift. Security experts say people now need to watch for suspicious requests, odd urgency, payment changes, prompt injection buried in emails or documents, and deepfake fraud. That last category alone is up more than 2,000% since 2022, and the examples are already ugly: a cited $25 million video-call scam, plus a 1,530% jump in cases across Asia-Pacific.