We’re all used to the signs of a spam message – typical giveaways tend to include; terrible grammar, nonsensical subject lines, or requests for large transfers of money to foreign accounts – should I go on?

Well, maybe I should, given how new research suggests that we may not be as savvy as we would like to think. Mimecast, the email management firm, recently revealed that 203,000 malicious links within 10,072,682 emails were deemed safe by other security systems – a ratio of one unstopped malicious link for every 50 emails inspected.

>See also: Ransomware top of the class for phishing attacks

As part of their cumulative assessments, Mimecast inspected more than 142 million emails that have passed through organisations’ incumbent email security vendors. Significantly, 19,086,877 pieces of spam, 13,176 emails containing dangerous file types, and 15,656 malware attachments were all missed and delivered to users’ inboxes.

Mimecast’s latest quarterly, Email Risk Assessment, also found an 80% increase impersonation attacks in comparison to last quarters’ report with 41,605 caught.

>See also: Gone phishing: 4 ways to combat the threat of ransomware …

Matthew Gardiner, cyber security strategist at Mimecast, said: “Targeted malware, heavily socially-engineered impersonation attacks, and phishing threats are still reaching employee inboxes. This leaves organisations at risk of a data breach and financial loss.”

“Our latest quarterly analysis saw a continued attacker focus on impersonation attacks quarter-on-quarter. These are difficult attacks to identify without specialised security capabilities, and this testing shows that commonly used systems aren’t doing a good job catching them.”

>See also: When is a CFO not a CFO? How to avoid being a ‘spear phishing’ victim