There was a time when phishing was related only to the phone calls. But now, the same criminal activity has diversified into many types such as spear phishing and whaling. Spear phishing can be termed as the criminal activity which can trigger a response from the unsuspecting victim. The email will seem to come from a person who is of authority in your organization or company or a Government Department. Due to respect, victims can divulge confidential information by sending return mails. Or they may click on a link leading to a fake website where they enter the details to be hacked by the criminal. The hacker can either sell the information or may use it for compromising systems/networks. In short, a spear-phishing attempt may impose a time restriction on the victim to divulge information at a short notice.
Spear Phishing
Phishing is a random activity done by hackers. Spear phishing is even more advanced. The target is to gain financial information, business secrets or military info.
How To Identify and Prevent Spear Phishing
If you have a Gmail, then the anti-phishing design automatically sends a phishing email to the spam folder.
There is a validation system known as DMARC. You can make use of DNS records to identify email spoofing.
Office
Your company culture should promote phishing training for every employee. Please note, the weakest link in the security of an organization may be an ill-informed
employee. They should be given strict guidelines to not access unwanted websites nor reply to emails from external sources.
The organization tech-head can conduct phishing exercises.
The employees can be rewarded for giving information on phishing to the security department.
If you are working in the office or your computer, do not forget to mark emails from unknown sources with a red flag. In case you have got a spear-phishing email, kindy note, the content will be modified and accurate to the point. It will support organization credentials. And the request made to the victim, it will have a logic and a timeline.
There will be a specific timeline attached to the email. Usually, in large corporates, the timeline is rarely mentioned in the email. And the response time for an email will be usually 18 to 24 hours. The hacker will use the method to make a victim perform a task that will be against the policies of the company.
The email will have content, that is too formal. Also, the jargon and words will not match with the language used by the concerned person or sender.
Individual Account
These days, hackers take time to know your name and your credentials. So, the mail received from the hacker will be complete with your name and designation. If the email claims to be from a nationalized bank and asks to log into your account, it is a red alert. A nationalized bank will never ask a citizen to change unnecessary details.
You can report to the IT department of the bank and wait for further instructions.
Do not divulge confidential info in your social media platforms. Change the date of birth on Facebook.
You should exercise caution while clicking on unidentified emails. They may contain malware. Once spyware gets downloaded on your computer, then the hacker can, with ease, gain information about the details.
You may even get an email with the company name of PayPal or Google. Or it may seem to come from an individual of high authority or repute within your organization. You may know the senior person in your team.
How Do The Hackers Collect Information?
Do you feel that it is difficult to collect your information in this digital era? There are many social media platforms where you enter the date of birth, your work information. And you are connected (your seniors) on LinkedIn.
Example –
You are an accounts executive in a company offering mobile repair services in Mumbai. Your company is also an acclaimed Vendor in an organization offering home appliance repairs in Mumbai. As an account executive, you send payments to the executives. Now, a hacker can get information from your LinkedIn account and Facebook account, regarding the seniors in your organization. He/she can then send an email to your official id to send the payment to a phone number. The email may come from another email but it will have the same words as your official company mail account. Yet, if you are alert, you can notice the slight change in spelling. In other words, it is a phishing email.
Let us take another example. You are the financial head of a large multinational company. You send emails to your team to dispatch the payments to various vendors. Now, the hacker takes note of your Facebook profile, gets to know the person in your team via their LinkedIn account. Through other social media platforms, and calls, he gets to know your official email id. He then creates a fake email id with a spelling mistake. It is but a spoof of your official id. So, when a new employee who dispatches payments to vendors get a mail from the hacker asking him to send money to a vendor, the money can disappear. This is the reason why spear attacks are considered powerful and to the core. The new employee will have no reason to doubt as this had come from an official mail.
Conclusion
These days, you give the laptop to your children to play games. They can download one app from a not-so reliable source and the malware gets downloaded to your laptop. By luck, you checked the device and found the malware. But try as you might, you are not able to remove it. So, the presence required the checking of a laptop repair technician.
These days, it is very easy to book a trustworthy mobile repair technician or any handyman professional. That is, if you stay in Indian urban cities. For example, you are in Bangalore and a similar situation. You need to search for a technician who has immense experience of laptop repair services in Bangalore. To book one, take the assistance of companies offering doorstep repair services of home appliances in the city. With the app, you can, with ease, book a technician and make him come to the desired location. You can , with ease, fix the problem.
So, this is the article on spear-phishing where even the brightest minds can become a victim. Have we let off a valuable point? You can, of course, put a message in the Reviews Section.
