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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Yujie Cao says
In my view spam phishing is a bigger threat when looking in the context of a DDoS attack simply because of the large volume of hosts that can become potential resources for a botnet as opposed to spear phishing where the target is specific and not organization wide.
Phishing is a form of social engineering attack designed to exploit humans and extract valuable information through deception. Today, social engineers are getting smarter and crafting phishing emails, often from legitimate sources, that are intriguing and often trick even those who are aware of phishing attacks.
Both spam phishing and spear phishing are used to obtain sensitive information from victims. While spam phishing targets as many individuals as possible, spear phishing targets a specific group or individual.
In the context of DDoS attacks, attackers will use phishing emails to lure victims into unknowingly installing bots. The greater the number of bots in the botnet, the more powerful the DDoS attack will be. Since the main goal of a DDoS attack is to disrupt availability, attackers are more likely to benefit from having a large number of hosts to take over.
Chun Liu says
While both spam and spear phishing pose a threat to an organization’s networks and computer resources, I believe that spam phishing poses the greater threat in the context of DDoS attacks.
There is an argument that the strength of a chain depends on its weakest link, and I think that applies here as well. While spear phishing is better suited for individuals and may have a higher success rate, if the target person understands the security practices, they should be able to avoid becoming a victim of a phishing attempt (ideally by reporting it). However, phishing spam has multiple targets, and it is enough for one person to be a victim to be successful. If an organization does not have a strong security awareness training program that extends to all employees at all levels of the company, they can fall victim to a phishing spam attempt.
I would also like to point out that even if an organization has a strong security awareness training program in place, it only takes one psychological mistake by one person to become a victim of a spam phishing attempt (e.g. clicking on a link in an email). For these reasons, spam phishing poses an even greater threat to an organization’s network and computer resources.
Shuting Zhang says
Spam phishing refers to the widespread distribution of unsolicited and fraudulent emails, typically sent in bulk to a large number of recipients. Spear phishing, on the other hand, is a more targeted form of phishing that involves personalized and highly tailored phishing emails. These emails are crafted to appear legitimate and are specifically designed to deceive a particular individual or a group of individuals within an organization.
However, spam phishing attacks can indeed lead to a larger number of compromised hosts, potentially making them valuable resources for building a botnet. The sheer volume of compromised hosts within a botnet can result in a more powerful DDoS attack, capable of overwhelming an organization’s network and computer resources. In contrast, spear phishing attacks typically target specific individuals or a select group of individuals within an organization. While spear phishing attacks can still lead to unauthorized access and compromise of individual systems or user accounts, the scale of impact may be more limited compared to spam phishing.
Considering the potential scale and magnitude of a DDoS attack, a larger number of compromised hosts resulting from spam phishing can contribute to a more significant threat to an organization’s network and computer resources.
Yawen Du says
I think the threat of unknowingly becoming its resources is greater. Distributed denial-of-service attacks are one of the most powerful weapons on the Internet, but can be overwhelmingly blocked by effective defense, but unknowingly becoming its resources is silent, and unknowingly its data and information is exploited or stolen, and cannot be detected and stopped in time, which will make the damage even greater.
Email phishing is the most common type of phishing and usually has some common features, such as, these emails often create an urgent atmosphere, such as requesting “please deal with it as soon as possible”, “urgent”, forcing the victim to disclose personal information to the attacker in a panic. In addition, the body of phishing emails often contain grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, while emails sent from regular organizations usually do not contain such errors. Spear phishing is actually a more targeted form of email phishing. In contrast, regular phishing is more random, and the attacker does not focus on a specific victim, but instead spreads harmful information widely. Spear phishing, on the other hand, selects a specific victim and uses social engineering to investigate the victim’s characteristics, job title, and contacts in detail to develop a highly credible phishing scheme and increase the success rate of social engineering. Spear phishing is often the first step in breaching an organization’s security defenses. Therefore, spear phishing is a greater threat to enterprise information security.
Chenhao Zhang says
I would argue that spam phishing poses a far greater threat to organizational networks and computer resources. If adversaries are localizing botnets to attack organizations, they’re probably playing a numbers game. Because thousands of e-mails overwhelm an organization’s systems, a heavy bombardment can eventually cause problems with its servers and may even force them to implement protections that cause E-mail delays. This means that organizations spend very laborious time dealing with problems internally and communicating between programs such as Outlook. It also poses a threat because only one person has to accidentally ignore the spam and send the information that the attacker exploits. In an organization of thousands of people, the chances of at least one person accidentally clicking on a link are extremely high.
Spear phishing doesn’t make sense in this case, because it only targets a specific person or group within an organization. Arguably, you don’t even need a botnet to launch this type of attack, and it would be a waste of time and resources for the attacker.
Guanhua Xiao says
1. Network congestion and service interruption. DDoS attacks with a large volume of traffic consume network bandwidth and server resources, resulting in severe network congestion or even breakdown, and cannot provide services for normal traffic. As a result, organization applications and systems are temporarily unavailable, affecting business operations.
2. Information security risk. During DDoS attacks, the network and server resources are saturated and cannot effectively defend against other information security threats. As a result, confidential data leakage and system intrusion risks increase.
3. The device is overloaded. Hardware modules such as servers and network devices may be overheated and damaged, shortening the service life of the devices and increasing maintenance costs.
4. Recovery time is long. After a large-scale DDoS attack, it takes time for the network to recover to the normal state. During this process, you need to detect and repair the impact of the attack, remove the congestion of the device and network, and restore the service system. The process may last from several hours to several days.
Yuanjun Xie says
Spam is unsolicited E-mail, usually commercial. Spam can burden the network, clog up E-mail servers, and fill mailboxes with useless and potentially offensive messages and images. Most spam is annoying, but not harmful. Most spam will be blocked by the E-mail server hosting your account.
Phishing is a specific type of spam that is used to obtain private information for use in identity theft and other fraud. Its E-mail appears as coming from a trusted source, such as your bank, and usually includes the actual corporate logo and a seemingly legitimate reply address.
How can you tell phishing emails from spam?
Phishing email:
● Often contains links to malicious websites
● Usually more formal
● Occasionally use urgent or threatening language so the recipient can act quickly
● Sender addresses generally look like they’re from a trusted source
Junk mail:
● It’s usually a business promotion
● There may be promotional content or fake contests
● Usually, there is a random or unfamiliar sender address
Spam phishing attacks can result in a large number of compromised hosts, potentially making them valuable resources for building botnets. The absolute number of infected hosts in a botnet is huge. Spear phishing attacks typically target a specific group of people within an organization, and while his attacks can still result in unauthorized access and harm to individual systems or user accounts, the scale of impact is likely to be more limited than that of spam phishing. Given the potential scale and extent of DDoS attacks, a large number of compromised hosts as a result of spam phishing may pose an even greater threat to an organization’s network and computer resources.
Zhang Yunpeng says
A significant consequence of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack is network inaccessibility. When an entity suffers a DDOS attack, the organization’s ability to successfully carry out its essential processes is undermined because it is the victim; however, If the company is a resource, it becomes part of the components of the DDOS attack. Therefore, being a resource to a DDOS attack is not as consequential as being the victim of a DDOS attack.
Spear phishing is a more substantial threat than spam phishing for one fundamental reason. Spam goes out to several end-users, and it is easier to spot. Spear phishing is to specific targets.
Chunqi Liu says
Spam and spear phishing pose a threat to an organization’s networks and computer resources, I believe that spam phishing poses the greater threat in the context of DDoS attacks.Email phishing is the most common type of phishing and usually has some common features, such as, these emails often create an urgent atmosphere, such as requesting “please deal with it as soon as possible”, “urgent”, forcing the victim to disclose personal information to the attacker in a panic. In addition, the body of phishing emails often contain grammatical errors and spelling mistakes, while emails sent from regular organizations usually do not contain such errors. Spear phishing is actually a more targeted form of email phishing. In contrast, regular phishing is more random, and the attacker does not focus on a specific victim, but instead spreads harmful information widely. Spear phishing, on the other hand, selects a specific victim and uses social engineering to investigate the victim’s characteristics, job title, and contacts in detail to develop a highly credible phishing scheme and increase the success rate of social engineering. Spear phishing is often the first step in breaching an organization’s security defenses. Therefore, spear phishing is a greater threat to enterprise information security.
Shuyi Dong says
In the context of being attacked by or unwittingly becoming a resource for distributed denial of service (DDoS), Spear phishing is a bigger threat to an organization’s network and computer resources than Spam phishing.
Spam phishing is a type of phishing attack that involves sending a large number of unsolicited emails to a wide audience in an attempt to trick them into revealing sensitive information or downloading malware. While spam phishing attacks can be annoying and time-consuming to deal with, they typically do not pose a significant threat to an organization’s network and computer resources.
Spear phishing, on the other hand, is a more targeted form of phishing attack that is directed at specific individuals or organizations. Spear phishing attacks are often personalized and appear to come from a trusted source, making them more difficult to detect and defend against. If successful, a spear phishing attack can result in the theft of sensitive information, such as login credentials or financial data, which can be used to launch a DDoS attack or other types of cyber attacks.
In summary, while both spam phishing and spear phishing are forms of phishing attacks, spear phishing is a bigger threat to an organization’s network and computer resources in the context of being attacked by or unwittingly becoming a resource for DDoS.
Hongli Ma says
In the context of being attacked by or unwittingly becoming a resource for distributed denial of service (DDoS), neither spam phishing nor spear phishing is a direct threat to an organization’s network and computer resources.
Spam phishing and spear phishing are both types of social engineering attacks that aim to trick individuals into divulging sensitive information or clicking on malicious links. While these attacks can lead to compromised systems, they are not typically used as a means of launching DDoS attacks.
The primary threat to an organization’s network and computer resources in the context of DDoS attacks comes from botnets, which are networks of compromised devices that can be controlled remotely by attackers. Botnets can be used to launch DDoS attacks by flooding targeted systems with traffic, overwhelming their capacity and causing them to crash or become unavailable.
Shijie Yang says
I believe that Spam phishing can be a bigger threat to the organization over spear phishing. Spear phishing is an attack that has been organized by a cyber criminal to attack a specific individual. After gaining information about an individual, the attacked is attempted. Spear phishing can have a high rate of success due to the highly customizable and personal emails that the attacker sends. If the individual is properly trained and knowledgeable, the attack can fail.
With Spam phishing, an attacker will send out a phishing email to thousands of employees in the organization. With Spam phishing, the attacker only needs one employee to open their email file/ link to gain access to the organization’s network and computer resources. With quantity or quality in this instance, I believe that an attack with thousands of opportunities to work over a handful is the reason why spam phishing is a bigger threat to the organization over spear phishing.
Nana Li says
Spam fills personal and business mailboxes with unsolicited E-mail. These messages have nothing to do with you or your organization. In addition to the annoyance these emails can cause, spam also spreads Trojan horses, ransomware, and other types of malware, a significant problem that results in lost time and productivity
In the context of a DDoS attack, the attacker will use phishing emails to lure the victim into unknowingly installing the bot. The greater the number of crawlers in the botnet, the more powerful the DDoS attack. Since the primary goal of a DDoS attack is to disrupt availability, an attacker is more likely to benefit from having a large number of host takeovers.
Haoran Wang says
I think spam phishing can be a bigger threat to the organization. The spam phishing will send to many employees in the company. The hacker only needs one person to open the email to gain access to the company network and system. Spam phishing creates more opportunities for hackers to gain access to the company network compared to spear phishing. Because spear phishing focuses on a specific individual.
Yi Liu says
While both spam phishing and spear phishing can have damaging consequences, spear phishing tends to be a more significant threat.
Spam phishing, also known as generic phishing, involves sending mass emails or messages to a large number of recipients indiscriminately. These emails typically mimic legitimate communications from well-known companies or organizations, aiming to deceive recipients into clicking on malicious links, downloading malware, or providing sensitive information.
Spear phishing, on the other hand, is a more targeted form of phishing. It involves personalized and highly tailored attacks directed at specific individuals or groups within an organization. Spear phishing attackers conduct thorough research on their targets, gathering information from various sources to create convincing and personalized messages.
Several Reasons:
(1)Precision targeting: Spear phishing attacks are carefully crafted to target specific individuals or groups, often leveraging social engineering techniques to exploit trust or personal information. (2)Higher success rate: Due to the personalized and targeted nature of spear phishing attacks, they are generally more successful than spam phishing attacks. The attackers invest time and effort in researching their targets, making the emails appear more credible and increasing the chances of recipients falling for the scam.(3)Potentially higher impact: Spear phishing attacks often aim at high-value targets within an organization, such as executives, system administrators, or employees with access to sensitive data.
Haixu Yao says
In the contexts of being attacked by or unwittingly becoming a resource for distributed denial of service (DDoS), I believe that spear phishing emails pose a greater threat to network and computer resources. Because in the case of DDoS, there will be a lot of spam phishing emails, and employees may ignore them; The spear phishing attack is aimed at specific targets and is a relatively advanced phishing attack. Unlike ordinary email phishing attacks, spear attacks are a type of email phishing attack that utilizes the construction of emails with specific themes and content, as well as attachments with malicious programs, to attract specific targets to download and open attachments.
Xinyi Peng says
In the context of being attacked by or unwittingly becoming a resource for Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS), Spear phishing is a bigger threat to an organization’s network and computer resources than Spam phishing.
Spear phishing is a type of phishing attack that targets specific individuals or groups within an organization. It is more targeted and personalized than spam phishing, which is a more generic and indiscriminate type of phishing attack.
Spear phishing attacks are usually carried out by cybercriminals who conduct extensive research on an organization and its employees before launching the attack. They may use information obtained from social media, company websites, or other sources to craft convincing and personalized messages that appear to come from a trusted source, such as a senior executive or a colleague.
Once an employee falls victim to a spear phishing attack, the attacker can gain access to the organization’s network and use the compromised computer or device to launch a DDoS attack. In this scenario, the compromised computer becomes part of a botnet, which is a group of computers that are controlled by a remote attacker to launch a DDoS attack.
Spam phishing attacks, on the other hand, are less targeted and more commonly used to spread malware or obtain sensitive information on a large scale. While spam phishing attacks can also be used to infect computers and turn them into bots for DDoS attacks, they are less effective than spear phishing attacks because they are less likely to fool employees into clicking on malicious links or attachments.
In summary, spear phishing is a bigger threat to an organization’s network and computer resources than spam phishing in the context of DDoS attacks because it is more targeted and personalized, making it easier for cybercriminals to gain access to the organization’s network and use its resources to launch a DDoS attack.
Xuanwen Zheng says
Spear phishing is a specific and targeted attack on one or a select number of victims, while regular phishing attempts to scam masses of people. In spear phishing, scammers often use social engineering and spoofed emails to target specific individuals in an organization.Compared with Spam phishing, Spear phishing poses a greater threat, it is more targeted, less difficult to identify, and more destructive.
Yiwei Hu says
Spam and spear phishing pose a threat to both an organization’s network and computer resources. In the context of DDoS attacks, I think spam phishing poses a greater threat to an organization’s network and computer resources. Spam phishing is a type of phishing attack in which phishing emails are sent to the target in an attempt to lure the target into downloading malicious software to reveal important personal information on their computer. While spam phishing attacks can be cumbersome to deal with, they often pose a significant threat to an organization’s network and computer resources if employees are successfully targeted by phishing spam attacks. On the other hand, attackers will use phishing emails to lure victims into unknowingly installing bots. A large number of host installation bots could become a potential resource for botnets, which could lead to more powerful DDoS attacks. In contrast, spear phishing attacks target a specific individual or a selected group of individuals within an organization. Considering the context of DDoS attacks, a large number of compromised hosts caused by spam phishing can pose an even greater threat to an organization’s network and computers.
Hao Li says
The greater threat posed by distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks to organizations is the inability to access their networks in a timely manner to run their business properly. If the corporate network becomes a resource for DDoS, organizational network performance will suffer. If a company resource is part of a DDoS attack, then the company can determine how that resource became part of the DDOS chain and remedy it. It takes time to perform forensics and determine whose system became part of the DDoS chain and remedy it, which means that if the company does not have adequate support, users will be unable to access the plan on that system for a longer period of time. Phishing emails also play a larger role in this DDoS attack, in order to make any system or network of the bot part of the attacker, the attacker will send a phishing email to the user and send it when the user clicks a link in the email. The malware will execute within their system. The system is then made part of the botnet.
Yue Ma says
Spear phishing. Because spear phishing is a more dangerous version of the common phishing attack, as it targets a specific person and uses social engineering techniques to trick the target into divulging sensitive information, downloading ransomwares or other malwares. The messages usually contain links, attachments or “calls to action” to click somewhere and “verify” or “update” the information, leading directly to malicious sources.
Typically, spear phishing emails target users who have specific access to the information the hackers want and the contents appear to be extremely persuasive.
Xiaozhi Shi says
Spear phishing poses a greater threat to an organization’s network and computer resources than spam phishing when subjected to a distributed denial of Service (DDoS) attack or inadvertently becoming a distributed denial of Service (DDoS) resource. In spear phishing, scammers often use social engineering and deceptive emails to target specific individuals in an organization. Compared to spam phishing, spear phishing poses a greater threat, is more targeted, less difficult to identify, and is more destructive.
Yuming He says
In the context of DDoS attacks, spam phishing is a greater threat: because a large number of hosts can become potential resources of Botnet.
Firstly, spam phishing needles are aimed at a large number of people. Attackers will use phishing emails to lure victims into installing robots unconsciously, causing more hosts to be invaded, obtaining sensitive information from victims, disrupting availability, and posing a greater threat to organizational networks and computer resources;
Secondly, harpoon phishing attacks typically target specific individuals or groups within an organization, which may lead to unauthorized access and destruction of individual systems or user accounts, posing a limited threat to the organization’s network and computer resources.
Yue Wang says
1, I was once in China Mobile Group Corporation, which has the largest number of mobile users, for two consecutive years as a project manager to participate in the procurement testing of DDoS for the whole group, simulating actual network attacks through instrumentation, simulating a variety of forms of attacks, and monitoring the diversion, cleaning and reinjection effects of the equipment, and testing the continuous and stable operation capability of the equipment under the peak, and issuing test reports on performance and functionality for the procurement staff I am therefore very familiar with DDoS equipment. As far as I know, there are many ways of DDoS, one is the traffic, there will be dns flood, icmp flood, udp flood or other, this is the use of tcp three handshake protocol vulnerability, the number of connections after the construction of the handshake failure, and then lead to threads exceed the capacity of the device and failure; there is another is the application layer, is through the saturation of application access requests, beyond the server access capacity, which then causes the application access to fail and block subsequent requests.
2, DDoS attacks are extremely harmful to SMEs, as they do not have sufficient resources to purchase sufficient lines, a very small DDoS attack traffic, can cause service paralysis. Today, operators rely on strong arithmetic networks, numerous network nodes, huge bandwidth, and low service prices to help SMEs achieve DDoS attack defence, such as China Telecom’s Cloud Dike product, which can achieve near-source cleaning in the provinces and cities where DDoS attackers are located in China by locking the IP of the DDoS initiation point and issuing cleaning policies through the signalling network, so that the attack traffic will not enter the The attack traffic will not enter the backbone network to avoid affecting the communication of other backbone lines.
3, Spam phishing or Spear phishing is indeed an extreme headache for security personnel.
(1) Firstly, it is triggered by negligence or lack of awareness of the most vulnerable people in security and cannot be avoided by automated machines or by being
(2) Secondly, successful phishing can compromise important usernames, passwords and other information, leading to successful attacks on other associated devices or websites;
(3) Again, I organise annual phishing email drills, where I construct enticing messages such as gifts, greeting cards or salaries to hook the relevant people and cause them to click on them; and finally, I attend annual corporate security attack drills, which always result in some threat due to phishing emails.
So, Spam phishing or Spear phishing is really quite a big threat.
Zhaomeng Wang says
Spam phishing is a means of mass attack. More likely to cause large-scale attacks.