In the contexts of being attacked by or unwittingly becoming a resource for distributed denial of service (DDoS), which is a bigger threat to an organization’s network and computer resources and why: Spam phishing or Spear phishing?
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Hijacking of resources such as domain name services, Web services, and perimeter routers would lead to what is most famously known as denial of service (DoS) or distributed denial of service (DDoS).
I believe that Spear Phishing can be a bigger threat to an organization’s network and computer resources rather than Spam Phishing. Spam is unsolicited emails sent to masses. Periodic and efficient Security Awareness Training can help avoid this problem but the bigger problem is Spear Phishing. Spear Phishing is geared towards specific people & organizations seeking unauthorized access to sensitive information. The important thing to make note of here is that emails sent here are posed as trusted sources. It is a malicious social-engineering tactic because hackers usually carry out a decent amount of research before sending it out (reconnaissance method). Spear Phishing is cleverly customized so it becomes difficult for organizations to detect them before it lands into the inboxes.
Spam phishing and spear phishing are two techniques that are commonly used to begin a security breach. Criminals use this simple, yet incredibly effective technique to convince victims to follow links to malware-ridden websites or to open infected email attachments, so beginning the events that lead to the next big headline.
Spear-phishing takes this one step further in its effectiveness, Spear phishing is an even more targeted attack, usually after doing some background research on you via social media., since instead of casting the net wide and hoping to get a few bites, the attacker targets specific individuals with more targeted messaging, such as using real names and information gleaned from social networks or other open source repositories to make the phishing attempt more believable. Spear-phishing is a tricky one step further as the attacker is after the “big fish” which will yield the biggest bounty for landing it. In most organizations, those big fish are the CEO, CFO and anyone with financial responsibility who has the ability to authorize payments of large invoices.
The FBI’s statistics of over US$2.3 billion being purloined since October 2013 through to February 2016 were collected from around 17,000 individual businesses that had been successfully targeted by attackers. This sample ranges from businesses reported approximately 80 countries, but since many cybercrimes go unreported, the issue is probably a lot worse. Spam Phisiing pose a number of threats from a variety of perspectives. Primarily, it clogs up our systems with unwanted messages, which consumes bandwidth and system resources as it goes. However, our systems are largely able to cope with that, but the real damage comes from the message content. Most spam messages are trying to entice you to click a link or open an attachment that has a malicious payload. This makes spam the medium for infection from any number of other kinds of malware, which is why it’s so dangerous. When you receive an email that tries to entice you to click a link or an attachment with
a carefully crafted message that seems targeted at you, the mode of operation that it’s using to attack you is known as phishing.
Hi Oluwaseun,
You do a good job at comparing spam phishing vs spear phishing and evaluating the consequences if either were to happen at an organizational level. I also found the FBI statistic you included regarding the cost of cyber attacks on businesses to be impactful. I agree with your suggestion that spear phishing can be more damaging to an organization because it targets employees who have a higher rank in the business and likely have authorized access to sensitive information that the cybercriminals may want. While spearfishing may potentially be more effective in data breaches (depending on the goals of the cybercriminals), do you believe that it remains a greater threat even in the context of an organization being attacked by DDos compared to spam phishing?
The definition of a distributed denial of service (DDos) attack is a cyber attack that overloads a network or service through an extraordinary amount of requests and traffic that can temporarily bring the network down. Typically, attackers often make use of botnets — a group of hijacked internet-connected devices to carry out large scale attacks. At first, I figured that spam phishing would pose a bigger threat to an organization’s network and computer resources because the more people that are targeted, the better the likelihood for an insider to interact with malware via email. On the other hand, spear phishing emails are carefully designed to target an INDIVIDUAL within an organization. In a typical DDos attack, the attacker(s) exploit a vulnerability in ONE computer system to control numerous devices using command and control software by attacking it from multiple angles; the more requests sent to the single target, the more powerful the attack. Therefore, I can infer that attackers are more likely to use spear phishing techniques when conducting a DDos attack.
Hi Elizabeth,
I think we have different answers. Perhaps you are right. The specially designed spear phishing exploits a loophole to carry out a powerful attack from multiple angles and multiple devices, which will cause more damage. But I think the disguise of spam phishing is also becoming more subtle. Some emails use of top-level domains. club,. shop,. Online, etc. make it easier to attract users to click on the link. Since the target of the attack is not single, the scope will be wider.
A distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is a malicious act that floods the target server or its surrounding infrastructure through large-scale Internet traffic in order to damage the target server, service, or normal network traffic. DDoS attacks use multiple compromised computer systems as the source of attack traffic to achieve the attack effect. This is like a traffic jam on a highway, preventing regular vehicles from reaching their intended destination. DDoS attacks are carried out through computer networks connected to the Internet. These networks are made up of computers and other devices (which are infected with malware and are controlled remotely by attackers. The most obvious symptom is that a website or service suddenly becomes slow or unavailable.
Spam phishing is sent to a large number of recipients randomly, and only a small number of people are expected to reply. Spear-phishing emails are carefully designed to allow a single recipient to respond. Criminals use social media and other public information to select personal goals within the organization and tailor fake emails for that person. Spam phishing has a wider range of targets. Once all employees of a company receive emails, one or more people may click on the link. This attack range and damage are greater.
Lin,
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).