To protect against this type of scam, organizations should conduct ongoing employee security awareness training that, among other things, discourages users from publishing sensitive personal or corporate information on social media. Companies should also invest in spear phishing prevention solutions that analyze inbound emails for known malicious links/email attachments. This solution should be capable of picking up on indicators for both known malware and zero-day threats. Additionally, targeted social media protection solutions can monitor for threats specifically on those platforms, weed out false positives, and block attacks.
Spear Phishing: Explanation, Examples and Protection
Phishing and spear phishing are both examples of social engineering cyber attacks. Social engineering manipulates victims into revealing sensitive information, such as passwords, social security numbers, and bank account details.
At an enterprise level, organizations can raise awareness about security, by actively training employees, and highlighting the importance of learning how to spot, and hopefully stop spear phishing attacks. These training materials may feature real-life examples or simulated spear phishing attacks, with fake emails being sent out, as well as questions designed to test employee knowledge.
The aforementioned protective measures are related in principle to human vulnerability, which of course serves as a primary gateway for a successful spear phishing attack. From a technical point of view, however, it also makes sense to introduce an IT security measure that offers companies extensive protection against spear phishing attacks.
Got it? Alright. Team Graphus has put together some clear definitions of phishing, spear phishing and social engineering. We have also included some examples and threw in whaling as a bonus term. A common understanding of these terms can help IT organizations and business executives communicate more clearly and better coordinate for defense against the most common forms of successful cyber attacks.
This is a newer term and is simply a spear phishing attack targeting senior executives, the whales. Whaling may resemble spear phishing or social engineering but is distinguished by who in the organization it goes after. Executives may need some extra training to spot these types of attacks and they certainly require some added protection from technology solutions that can prevent incidents before they occur. If you are protected from spear phishing, you can assume you are also protected from Whaling.
Pair this with the fact that spear phishing emails are becoming increasingly hard to detect because they often look like normal business emails, e.g. a link to collaborate in Google Drive file. Additionally, phishing protection software can often miss these types of attacks because they don't want to block genuine emails and frustrate users.
Glaring examples of top tech companies and government organizations, that have all the technical security measures in place, being made victims of phishing scams underscore that hi-tech security solutions can only do this much. Ultimately the employee can either be the weakest or strongest link in protecting your organization. Here are the top four things you should do now to protect your organization from spear-fishing:
This anti-spear-phishing tool is beneficial for enhancing the security of Office 365, G Suite, etc. This tool is also used in other organizational protection aspects such as monitoring user and platform configurations, watching for changes in files in cloud storage, email filtering, account takeover protection, and configuration security.
The potential business impacts from spear phishing in e-commerce are quite serious. Breaches of customer data are costly and embarrassing. There are notifications that must be made, identity protection services offered and potential lawsuits to be dealt with.
One of the most prominent examples of spear phishing in the public sector involves the case of Charles Harvey Eccleston who pleaded guilty to sending out emails to U.S Department of Energy employees. These emails carried a virus that could potentially compromise government computers and result in sending sensitive data about US nuclear weapon program to foreign governments.
Targeted spear phishing attacks are carefully designed to go undetected. Given their highly personalized nature, these attacks are far more difficult to prevent as compared to regular phishing scams. There is no fixed script that can be followed against spear phishing protection, but the following best practices almost always work
Unlike phishing, spear phishing is significantly harder to detect given the amount of research and prior planning that goes into these scams. Cybercriminals use various techniques to monitor emails, file sharing, and internet browsing activities of target users to meticulously gather background information. Effectively preventing these attacks requires monitoring all these activities and, often, in real-time. For this reason, users must invest in the right technology that is purpose-built for such multi-dimensional threat protection. This is very different to antivirus or other malware protection tools that look only at isolated instances of attack.
While technology alone cannot provide robust protection against spear phishing, it is also certain that general purpose anti-virus or even anti-phishing tools will not suffice. Scammers invest heavily in creating innovative spoofs and the only way to protect against them is to use purpose-built technology that constantly invests into upgrading its capabilities to detect spams. This could be done by incorporating measures against known cases of spear phishing or through using advanced machine learning techniques that can predict the likelihood of an email being part of a spear phishing attack.
The DHS provides several spear phishing email examples. In one, an email that appears to be from the BBB addresses the recipient by name and says there has been a complaint that the company is violating the Fair Labor Standards Act. The recipient is encouraged to click a link to download a file with an explanation. In another, an email appears to be from DocuSign and says that a specific person has shared a file with them, which can be accessed by clicking a link. 2ff7e9595c
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