'Spear phishing' recurs

(9 June ~ 13 June)
An increasing number of personalised scam-related spam emails are trying to steal into our inboxes again.

Sophos Plc. senior technology consultant Graham Cluley said their team has recently seen this trend. These types of spam emails would impersonate a legitimate company or any seemingly credible source with content highly related to the receiver, thus the term “spear phishing”.

“We’ve seen phishing campaigns which have targeted CEOs. They may send fake legal instructions, urging them to click on the link or reply with information.”

This technique is similar to traditional phishing in that they both pretend to be a certain company or a government body. The difference is the amount of emails sent and people they choose to send to.

“Rather than just emailing random addresses, spammers may get themselves a list of the chief financial officers, CEOs, or the heads of human resources at businesses up and down the country.

“They manipulate the email to be of special interest to specific people. They may refer to specific things which make people think this isn’t a generic email and believe it was sent by the FBI or the jury service.

“Another trick would be using the same domain name of a company or even faking one in
the email address that looks something like ‘@ so-and-so company.com’.”