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What Is Spear Phishing?The newer and more potent online information gathering is known as ' spear phishing '. The additional risk to a consumer is based around the targetted nature of the attack. By cloning the sites of well known and widely used companies (PayPal and eBay are two favourites to use) and then sending emails to mass mailing lists which look as if they have been sent direct from the company involved, the fraudsters appear to be more successful. As one might imagine, receiving an email from some far off company that the recipient has never heard of will raise suspicions and probably end up in the delete file. However, if the recipient is a client of the firm being copied, eBay for example, the likelyhood of people thinking the messages are genuine rocket. Since the victim will be viewing a message that appears genuine from a company they know and trust, perhaps their bank or credit card company, everything seems to be in order. It is believed that this makes response rates improve significantly for the ID fraudster. As with normal phishing emails and sites, the victim is directed to provide personal account information into the site to 'verify' their details. The identity fraudster will have established this fake site and will have a programme running in the background to capture all this information. This makes spear phishing very dangerous indeed. After all, we may never realise that we have been conned! To read more about related topics:
Identity Theft Phishing
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