Whaling Attacks: Emerging as Major Cyber Security Threat

1. Whaling Attacks: Emerging as Major Cyber Security Threat A whaling attack is a targeted attack wherein attacker aims to steal sensitive information from a company such as financial information or personal details about employees. A whaling attack specifically targets C-level executives, such as CEO, CFO, or other senior management executives. Whaling attack is called so because fraudsters use high level executive names and email addresses to wire money or sensitive documents from a company. Number of whaling attacks has increased dramatically in the last few years. According to a latest survey, 55 percent of IT professionals have said their organizations have seen an increase in the volume of whaling attacks in the last one year. Businesses lost more than $1.2 billion in last two years due to whaling attacks. The goal of such cyber attack is to trick an executive into revealing sensitive corporate data via website spoofing or ask finance department to transfer money to an external account through e-mail phishing.

2. Examples of whaling attacks Snapchat, a social media app, fell victim to a whaling attack when a high-ranking employee was fooled into revealing employee payroll information. The attacker impersonated to be the CEO of Snapchat and asked one of its employees to reveal sensitive information. In a similar incident, Seagate – a data storage company – unknowingly answered a whaling email that requested an executive to reveal income tax information of all current and former employees. How to prevent whaling attacks? Whaling mails are difficult to identify as they do not contain malicious attachment or dodgy URLs. It’s all about social engineering. Cyber criminals do a lot of research to match a CEO or CFO profile before sending phishing mails. To improve whaling security, organizations need advanced threat protection and security operation centre (SOC). IT professionals of security operation centre can use pattern recognition for classification of spam mails. SOC is equipped with threat protection software that uses algorithms to measure mail identifiers and provide a probability score to tell whether a mail is safe or malicious. IT security professionals should install two-factor authentication program for email to avoid phishing attacks. An email filtering system can be used that identifies and flags emails sent from similar-looking domain names. Employees, from C-level executives to lower level employees, should be given security awareness training for potential whaling and spear phishing targets. Employees must be trained on the processes need to perform before transferring funds or sensitive information, such as face to face verification or verification over phone. Whaling attacks are effective when there are loopholes in your security measures and employees are not trained on cyberattacks. By implementing a security operation center with right security measures will greatly decrease the risk of an enterprise falling victim to a whaling attack.