
The content will be likely crafted to be of interest to the person or role targeted - such as a subpoena or customer complaint. Whaling refers to spear phishing attacks directed specifically at senior executives and other high-profile targets. While susceptibility in young users declined across the study, susceptibility in older users remained stable. Forty-three percent of users fell for the simulated phishing emails, with older women showing the highest susceptibility. A browser plugin recorded their clicking on links in the emails as an indicator of their susceptibility. In total, 100 young and 58 older users received, without their knowledge, daily simulated phishing emails over 21 days. Ī recent study tested the susceptibility of certain age groups against spear fishing. They attacked more than 1,800 Google accounts and implemented the domain to threaten targeted users. Threat Group-4127 (Fancy Bear) used spear phishing tactics to target email accounts linked to Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential campaign. A 2019 study showed that accountancy and audit firms are frequent targets for spear phishing owing to their employees' access to information that could be valuable to criminals. Spear phishing typically targets executives or those that work in financial departments that have access to the organization's sensitive financial data and services. In contrast to bulk phishing, spear phishing attackers often gather and use personal information about their target to increase their probability of success of the attack.

This is essentially the creation and sending of emails to a particular person to make the person think the email is legitimate. Spear phishing involves an attacker directly targeting a specific organization or person with tailored phishing communications. Compromised streaming service accounts are usually sold directly to consumers on darknet markets. Attackers may use the credentials obtained to directly steal money from a victim, although compromised accounts are often used instead as a jumping-off point to perform other attacks, such as the theft of proprietary information, the installation of malware, or the spear phishing of other people within the target's organization. The content of a bulk phishing message varies widely depending on the goal of the attacker–common targets for impersonation include banks and financial services, email and cloud productivity providers, and streaming services. Most phishing messages are delivered by email spam, and are not personalized or targeted to a specific individual or company–this is termed "bulk" phishing.
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The first recorded use of the term "phishing" was in the cracking toolkit AOHell created by Koceilah Rekouche in 1995 however, it is possible that the term was used before this in a print edition of the hacker magazine 2600. As of 2020, phishing is by far the most common attack performed by cybercriminals, the FBI's Internet Crime Complaint Centre recording over twice as many incidents of phishing than any other type of computer crime. Phishing attacks have become increasingly sophisticated and often transparently mirror the site being targeted, allowing the attacker to observe everything while the victim is navigating the site, and transverse any additional security boundaries with the victim.
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Phishing is a type of social engineering where an attacker sends a fraudulent (e.g., spoofed, fake, or otherwise deceptive) message designed to trick a person into revealing sensitive information to the attacker or to deploy malicious software on the victim's infrastructure like ransomware.
