Email and Spear Phishing: How to Protect Yourself and Your Business

When you think of spear phishing, the first thought in your mind typically isn’t of a hacker. However, these emails are a technique of attacks from cybercriminals who have been controlling for a while now. Email and Spear phishing are similar and it is the attempt to acquire personal and sensitive information. Cyber criminals do this by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in the attempt to receive financial information, passwords, bank and credit card accounts from your computer. They will send out thousands of emails in hopes for one person or business will fall for it.

What is Spear Phishing?

Spear phishing is a high targeted phishing cyber-attack technique that is aimed at specific individuals or businesses. The spear phishing emails typically contain very particular personal information about an individual or company, to get them to open up the email. The emails specifically name the target, and/or contain their specific rank or title within their company. These spear phishing emails are utilised as part of an advanced persistent threat which is specialised at leveraging email that is aimed at their chosen victim. They are hoping for the likelihood that the target will open up an email that is addressed to them personally and will go to the extent of attaching a document that appears to be authentic and it significantly raises the chances of targets reading a message that will allow attackers to compromise their networks.

What is Email Phishing?

Email phishing are messages that are sent on a daily basis and are sent to unsuspecting victims all over the world. Even though some of these messages seem so outlandish that you can tell they are obvious frauds, others can be a bit more convincing. Unfortunately these days there is no one single technique to decipher if an email is legitimate or phishing, but there are a number of things that you can look for. The things to keep an eye out are messages that contain mismatched URLs, it contains a misleading domain name, poor spelling and grammar, it asks for personal information, you are asked to send money for expenses, you didn’t initiate the action and it makes unrealistic threats.

One of the things that you should constantly be aware of are emails from government agencies but something doesn’t look right. Cyber attackers want to use intimidation and will not always pose as a bank. Frequently they will send emails claiming that they come from a law enforcement agency such as the IRS or the FBI or any entity that will scare the average law-abiding citizen.

How to Protect Yourself or Business from Attacks

There are a number of ways to protect yourself and your businesses from cyber-attacks that organisations can leverage against spear phishing attacks. You will need to be aware of all the types of threats that exist today and have all members educated about the risk these messages can create. This way they can protect themselves and their company from any infections. They should be aware of what to look for such as unfamiliar senders and anything that looks suspicious as well as not open any attachments or links that are contained in the emails.  Once you open up these emails, the hackers leverage the platform to infect the network with malware which allows access to the infrastructure. This will enable them to steal sensitive information and be used for fraudulent purposes.

Email and spear phishing emails are currently a huge threat to every online business and individual, where you can fall victim to online fraud. There are many ways to protect yourself such as utilising email protection solutions, also having a virus protection program constantly running and upgraded as well as safeguarding your personal information. If you are worried about yourself or your business and want more information, please contact our certified representatives at www.tristaritsupport.co.uk/contact.