What is Spear Phishing?
Spear phishing is the act of sending and emails to specific and well-researched targets while purporting to be a trusted sender. The aim is to either infect devices with malware or convince victims to hand over information or money.
This is how it works: An email arrives, apparently from a trustworthy source, but instead it leads the unknowing recipient to a bogus website full of malware. These emails often use clever tactics to get victims' attention
SPEAR-PHISHING VS. PHISHING
Spear-phishing can easily be confused with phishing because they are both online attacks on users that aim to acquire confidential information. Phishing is a broader term for any attempt to trick victims into sharing sensitive information such as passwords, usernames, and credit card details for malicious reasons. The attackers often disguise themselves as a trustworthy entity and make contact with their target via email, social media, phone calls (often called “vishing” for voice-phishing), and even text messages (often called “smishing” for SMS-phishing).
Unlike spear-phishing attacks, phishing attacks are not personalized to their victims, and are usually sent to masses of people at the same time. The goal of phishing attacks is to send a spoofed email (or other communication) that looks as if it is from an authentic organization to a large number of people, banking on the chances that someone will click on that link and provide their personal information or download malware. Spear-phishing attacks target a specific victim, and messages are modified to specifically address that victim, purportedly coming from an entity that they are familiar with and containing personal information. Spear-phishing requires more thought and time to achieve than phishing. Spear-phishing attackers try to obtain as much personal information about their victims as possible to make the emails that they send look legitimate and to increase their chance of fooling recipients. Because of the personal level of these emails, it is more difficult to identify spear-phishing attacks than to identify phishing attacks conducted at a wide scale. This is why spear-phishing attacks are becoming more prevalent.
How to Protect yourself....
Setup Multi Factor authentication on EVERYTHING.
Never give out your credit card information pay with paypal
NEVER EVER Give anyone your password for ANY REason, Even your own IT
if IT needs your password they can change it with out your help, Don't Give IT or anyone your password.
Never Give out your MFA Token NEVER. EVER. NEVER. that is NEVER Give it out
If in doubt use a source NOT in the Email to CALL The sender
SPEAR-PHISHers Already have information about you so be extra careful as the email/website is targeted at YOU!