Spear Phishing in 2021: The Most Dangerous of All Phishing Attacks

The potency of a phishing attack is directly proportional to the believability of the source of the email. The more believable the identity of the sender, the more potent is the phishing attack. A spear phishing attack is a kind of phishing attack where the sender chooses a domain that appears to belong to a trusted source to the recipient.

These attacks are specially designed to target a specific set of victims. Spear phishing attacks are more often than not carried out on employees of different organizations. Most of the time, the attackers impersonate a person of high authority in the organization to carry out a spear phishing attack. For example — the receiver would get an email that says it’s from the CEO. This particular category of spear phishing attacks is called CEO Fraud.

There are some differences between a regular phishing attack and a spear phishing attack. The major one being that of the approach of attack. A spear phishing attack targets a few high-value targets. This is opposite to the approach undertaken by a regular phishing attack that goes after many low-value targets.

There is a Pattern to a Spear Phishing Attack

As mentioned above, a spear phishing attack targets a set of victims that fits in their phishing template. Therefore, these kinds of attacks follow a pattern of actions.

1. Target Recce — The attacker does an in-and-out reconnaissance of the target individual or organization. This is the information about the target that is available in the public domain. This can be collected through social media, websites, marketing material and other such sources. With a better quality of information, the attacker can design the attack almost perfectly to make the email more believable.
2. Email Address Extraction — Attackers use different scripts to download email addresses and categorize them according to their needs. Hackers source these target email addresses by either buying them on the dark web or using corporate websites to get publicly listed email addresses.
3. Collecting information about the Anti Virus suite — Attackers also gather information about the Anti Virus suite used in the organization. This is done to design the attack perfectly in order to bypass the protection.
4. Bypassing firewall egress — Firewall egress is used to stop traffic from being sent from the victim’s computer to a malicious destination. However, malicious actors use modules within the payload to allow traffic out of the victim’s computer. These modules help in such movement of traffic without getting caught by the firewall.
5. Choosing the phishing template — The email scenario or template used by the attacker plays a major role in the success of the phishing campaign. In a spear phishing attack, the scenario is designed carefully to make it as believable as possible. One of the most commonly used phishing attack templates is launched in the name of the IT department. The message usually requires the victims to download an urgent security patch.
6. Final step — If the attack is successful, the attacker can then do anything with the information that he now has access to. Prevention of such attacks is the only solution as the hacker sits in the driver’s seat after a successful attack. The damage can be limited only from his end and not from the victim’s.

How to Prevent a Spear Phishing Attack?

The impact of a spear phishing attack is deep and long-lasting. According to a study published by CSO Online, a successful phishing attack results in an average loss of $1.6 million. Therefore, it is important for organizations to prepare and prevent such attacks from taking place.

Some of the following preventive measures can be effective in protecting organizations from spear phishing attacks-

1. Employee Awareness — An aware employee forms the first line of defence against phishing attacks. Using awareness training tools like ThreatCop can be important in training the employees in how to deal with different types of cyber attacks. It uses simulation through different attack vectors which can be customized to suit the settings of the organization. It also provides awareness programmes that educate the user after the campaign ends. A spear phishing attack template can be used to educate employees about spear phishing.
2. Phishing incident response tools — Using phishing incident response tools like Threat Alert Button can go a long way in preventing spear phishing attacks. It empowers employees to report suspicious emails instantly and allows you to permanently remove malicious phishing emails from the employees’ inboxes.
3. Domain Security Tools — Implementing domain security tools like KDMARC can significantly help in protecting your domain name from being misused for launching spear phishing attacks on your organization.
4. Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) — Multi-Factor Authentication adds to the already established layers of security. This extra layer of security can help in eliminating the chances of a data breach or other mishaps that occur as a result of manual error.

Conclusion

Spear phishing has increasingly become one of the most potent means of delivering malicious links and attachments to trap victims. The whole project of recovering from a successful spear phishing attack can be very costly in terms of time and money. It is better for organizations to put appropriate measures in place to prevent these attacks from occurring in the first place. A well-founded defense against such attacks is an asset for any organization. Consequently, any investment towards this objective should be considered very important.