Spear phishing is a type of hacker attack that is very dangerous but not impossible to recognize. Let’s see how it works and how to avoid it.
Anyone who uses the Internet has heard of phishing at least once, this is a type of hacker attack that aims to mislead a user to take possession of his data. Over the years, cybercriminals have invented new attacks of this type, including QRishing and spear phishing.
If the first has become known to many, the same has not happened for spear phishing, still quite unknown. So let’s see what it is, how it works, how to recognize it and how to avoid it.
Spear phishing: what is it and how it works
Spear phishing is a phishing hack attack. Compared to the traditional one, which aims to deceive as many inattentive users as possible by sending many infected e-mails, spear phishing follows a more widespread logic, that is, it seeks to attract a specific type of user to its network, if not exactly one in particular. In this case, therefore, the hackers do not limit themselves to generating a "credible" e-mail to push the user to open its contents and fall into a trap, but try to create one so faithful as to seem directed precisely to the unfortunate victim.
To succeed, hackers are required to study well the person or company they want to target with their spear phishing attack, otherwise their trap is unlikely to work. In particular, hackers look online for contacts, social profiles and everything that can be used to make their email more credible. Furthermore, to make their attack attempts more effective, many scammers make use of social engineering strategies, trying, for example, to catch users unprepared and to push them to perform an action in a quickly and without thinking.
The economic return of spear phishing is also very different from that of the traditional attack. This happens because in selecting who to attack with this technique, hackers rigorously choose targets that can bring them a significant economic return. In traditional phishing, however, hackers send a lot of infected e-mails hoping that some user will inattentively open the content, falling into a trap. In these cases, however, generally the economic return is not worthy of note.
In companies, the people most often subjected to spear phishing attacks are those who handle payments and who have extensive access to confidential information. The latter figures often coincide with the executives, but in this case the hacker attack takes the name of Whailing, which aims at "big fishs" such as executives, often holders of valuable information.
In corporate environments, a great way to prevent spear phishing from happening is to train your staff. By hiring qualified figures, it is possible to explain how to recognize a case of spear phishing to employees and managers: links with strange urls, obvious grammar or typing errors in the subject of the e-mails or in the body of the text. Having a staff more prepared to recognize threats will make it easier to predict them and consequently avoid them.
How to defend against spear phishing
To defend yourself against spear phishing attacks, as for traditional ones, it is important to follow some simple but important behavioral guidelines. In the case of spear phishing you need to be even more careful, because the emails are more detailed and difficult to recognize than those made for traditional phishing.
In any case, the best tool to defend yourself against this type of threat is none other than common sense: before opening any link, be it in an email or a QR code, it is always good to check the site to which they refer. The people who most often fall victim to this type of hack attack are those who open any link that comes to them without thinking.
There are also some tools for the protection of your e-mail box that automatically and very effectively report all e-mails that are deemed spam.
If you do not think you are able to recognize potentially dangerous e-mails, having software such as these can be a good solution.
Original article published on Money.it Italy 2023-01-19 19:44:00. Original title: Spear phishing: cos’è, come funziona, come difendersi
