Spear phishing is a targeted cyber attack in which scammers impersonate trusted contacts to deceive specific individuals into sharing sensitive information, often through personalized emails.
Unlike generic phishing, spear phishing messages are tailored using publicly available data and may contain malicious links or attachments. Attackers aim to steal credentials, financial information, confidential documents or intellectual property.
Spear phishing is a widely used cyber attack due to its high success rate.
What Is Spear Phishing?
Spear phishing is a type of phishing attack in which attackers impersonate trusted contacts — often through personalized emails — to trick individuals into revealing sensitive information like login credentials, financial data or confidential documents.
How Does Spear Phishing Work?
Spear phishing requires attackers to conduct research before launching an email campaign. They often use open source intelligence (OSINT), such as LinkedIn, to gather details about a target’s role and organization. With this information, they craft emails that mimic typical business communications to trick recipients into sharing information or clicking malicious links or attachments.
How to Identify Spear Phishing
There are several parts of an email you should check when trying to determine if a message is legitimate:
- Sender address: Oftentimes the email display name will be spoofed to make it seem like a trusted source. Checking the actual sender address can help identify the true source of the email.
- Message: Be on the lookout for misspellings, grammatical errors, words that express urgency or a change in the typical message format.
- Hyperlinks and Attachments: If you weren’t expecting a link or attachment, don’t click on either before verifying it’s from a trusted source. For links, review the URL to confirm whether the domain is what you would expect. For attachments, it’s always best to scan them prior to opening them using an online tool or antivirus product.
Spear Phishing vs. Other Phishing Attacks
Spear phishing is one of several social engineering techniques attackers use to steal information. Phishing, smishing, vishing and whaling are all methods malicious actors employ to steal information from those they are able to trick into providing it.
Phishing
Phishing shares similarities with spear phishing in its use of deceptive emails, but it targets a broad audience rather than specific individual. Phishing targets random people whose email addresses were publicly available, usually due to a data breach.
Smishing and Vishing
Smishing and vishing use SMS or voice calls to impersonate trusted sources, often linking to spoofed websites or mimicking support lines to extract login credentials or payment details.
Whaling
Whaling, the most targeted type of phishing, targets high-profile individuals like C-level executives, executive committee members or government officials. Whaling is the most complex and sophisticated social engineering method because it requires patience and creativity from the attacker’s end. To successfully execute a whaling attack, a malicious individual must gain their target’s trust, which they usually do by carefully integrating information gleaned from public sources that can be used to persuade the “whale” into offering up sensitive information that they otherwise wouldn’t provide.
Frequently Asked Questions
What makes spear phishing more dangerous than regular phishing?
Spear phishing uses tailored information to deceive specific targets, increasing the likelihood of success compared to generic phishing campaigns.
What are some examples of spear phishing attacks?
Examples of spear phishing include:
- Emails pretending to be from a company executive requesting wire transfers
- Messages mimicking a cloud provider asking employees to reset passwords
How can organizations defend against spear phishing?
Common defenses against spear phishing attacks include:
- Employee training
- Email filtering
- Multi-factor authentication (MFA)
- Monitoring for unusual account activity
