What Is Spear Phishing? How to Protect Against It

Spear phishing is a form of phishing attack in which hackers use email links. It harms not only the victim but also businesses and organizations. Still, not many people know about spear phishing well enough to stay alert to these attackers. So in this article, Mona Media will answer What is spear phishing and the key points about this type of attack that readers should know.

What is spear phishing?

Spear phishing is a form of online fraud in which the attacker uses targeted techniques to trick the victim into believing they have received a legitimate email from someone familiar. As a result, the victim has no defenses up and readily complies with the request in the fake email.

The methods used in a spear phishing attack combine client-side attacks, social engineering, or requests made through websites or social networks. However, the most common approach is to lure users into clicking or downloading a malicious link or file sent through an email, text message or tweet.

For example, a business whose domains is monaco.com, with the subdomain something.monaco.com. Based on that, hackers create an email ID such as support@something.monaco.com, making users believe the email is connected to the business monaco.com.

The common goal of spear phishing is to get into the victim's computer by secretly planting a backdoor (a hidden way in) to gain unauthorized remote access to the data on the machine. Most of these attempts are made by attackers looking for trade secrets, financial gain or sensitive information.

A real-world example of spear phishing

If you regularly follow IT news, you have probably heard of the spear phishing attack on Elara Caring, a home health care provider. It was a large-scale attack that leaked a lot of patient information.

Specifically, in December 2020 hackers broke into computers belonging to two Elara Caring employees without authorization. Using spear phishing, they successfully stole access to the two employees' email accounts and collected personal information of more than 100,000 patients. The personal data compromised in the incident included personal details, health insurance policy numbers, bank accounts, résumés, and more.

In 2021, the email security company Tessian reported that in its survey more than 75% of organizations had been victims of spear phishing and 96% had experienced email phishing.

How spear phishing works

First, hackers target the company website to steal key contact information. They then use the information they have to craft a fake email and send it to the company's employees.

Typically, the fake email asks the employee to open an attachment or log in with a username and password to perform some task. These are all spyware or some other malicious program. Because the email appears to come from a trusted source, users tend to let their guard down.

If successful, hackers obtain the login credentials for the company's critical systems. They then use that information to impersonate employees and gain access to the company's important data.

Spear phishing usually lies in wait on media and social networks, because thousands of users share personal information on these channels every day.

However, hackers are selective: they search for and choose potential victims to collect key information such as personal details, bank account passwords or credit cards. Once they have the passwords and related information, hackers break in and steal the user's important data for malicious purposes such as selling user information or taking money from accounts.

Characteristics of spear phishing

Targeted spear phishing attacks have several main characteristics:

• Combines multiple techniques: Spear phishing combines several components, including fake emails, exploitation of unpatched zero-day vulnerabilities in applications, links, and techniques that automatically download malware.
• Exploits unpatched application vulnerabilities: Spear phishing often targets unpatched vulnerabilities in web browsers, plug-ins or desktop applications to harm the system.
• Multi-step attacks: Hackers create exploits that connect the system to external malware, download binaries and leak data.

Spear phishing vs. phishing vs. whaling

Fake-email attacks come in many forms today. Besides spear phishing there are phishing and whaling. All three are very common information-stealing attacks carried out through email links. They differ in the targets they aim at, as follows:

• In spear phishing, hackers send a highly convincing fake email to a specific individual or group. Narrowing the target lets hackers collect personal information more easily and in more detail.
• Phishing sends fake emails to a large group of recipients, then looks for and collects personal or organizational information.
• Whaling uses personalization aimed at higher-ranking, higher-status targets such as company directors, executives and politicians. It uses social engineering and email spoofing to access the target's sensitive data.

Signs of spear phishing

Spear phishing uses sophisticated deception techniques that make it hard for users to recognize and prevent. Signs of a fake email include:

• The email address does not match a trusted person or domain because of a typo or swapped characters.
• The email is usually urgent and makes suspicious requests.
• The email contains many typos and grammar mistakes, and the language is inconsistent.

How to prevent spear phishing

Although spear phishing is sophisticated and hard to detect, businesses, organizations and individuals can still stop it with the following measures:

For users:

• Limit sharing personal information and other sensitive details such as bank accounts and credit cards on social networks or other media.
• Do not click suspicious links or attachments in emails.
• Use tools that analyze incoming email content and traffic to tell whether it is suspicious or genuine.

For businesses:

• Train employees to recognize and handle fake emails.
• Budget for a social engineering audit within the company at least once every six years.
• Equip the company with supporting tools such as antivirus software, spam filters and security software to block threats.

That covers what spear phishing is and the key points about this type of attack. Whether you are an ordinary user, a company employee or a business owner, you need to stay alert to email attackers. To avoid them, the most effective approach is to build the best protection system you can for your own computer.

We hope this article from Mona Media has given readers useful information. If you have any questions about What is spear phishing or want to learn how to protect your computer and personal information, contact MONA for advice on the best security solution.

See also:

• What is a phishing email? How to avoid scam emails
• What kind of attack is a malware attack?