Spear Phishing Explained
Everything you need to know to protect your organisation and employees from the dangers associated with spear phishing attacks
What is Spear Phishing?
Spear phishing is a targeted attempt to steal personal or sensitive information from a specific individual or organisation with malicious intent. If successful in their cyber attack, attackers can install malware on an organisation’s computer, lock and delete important files, or conduct illegal activities from the compromised computer. The IT and organisational damage from spear phishing is often large and may include time, money and reputational damages.
How does Spear Phishing Work?
Spear phishing emails are much more successful than phishing emails as attackers have carefully designed the email to ensure a single person clicks or responds. Attackers will select an individual to target and then mine easily accessible information about that individual (from social media and the internet) to craft a fake email to that person.
Because the attacker has included personal information in the email, clicks are often much higher on spear phishing, and therefore more dangerous to your organisation. Users may click on links, unwittingly installing malware onto their computer and causing a security breach.
Phishing vs Spear Phishing
Phishing emails can be hard enough for your employees to spot and with the added authority captured in a spear phishing attempt, employees are at even higher risk of clicking.
Phishing describes the attempt to solicit personal information (passwords, banking details, and more) for malicious reasons. However, phishing is typically sent to users on mass, in the hopes that one user out of many will click on a malicious link.
Spear phishing is hyper targeted, utilising researched information about a specific user to gain authority and ensure a click. Spear phishing emails build credibility by including easily accessible information points such as your name, place of employment, job title, email address or date of birth.
Ensuring employees are aware of Spear Phishing
The easiest way to minimise your organisation’s risk from spear phishing is through effective, ongoing phishing awareness training.
Phriendly Phishing recognises that most employees are non-technical. Through story-telling content, role-based and scenario based activities, the Phriendly Phishing learning journey focuses on how learners can protect the organisation, themselves and their families from attacks such as spear phishing.
Increase Spear Phishing Awareness
Change employee behaviour with journey-based phishing awareness training and keep spear phishing top of mind.
Our demonstrations are led by security experts who will welcome the opportunity to show you an Australian based, effective and measurable response to phishing and spear phishing threats.
- Empower users by taking them on a learning journey
- Track performance over time
- A ‘zero touch solution’