Spear Phishing

Spear phishing is an e-mail spoofing fraud attempt that targets a specific organization, seeking unauthorized access to confidential data. As with the e-mail messages used in regular phishing expeditions, spear phishing messages appear to come from a trusted source. Using social networking it gains the trust of receivers to open e-mail, and implants Trojan to the victim computers, theft of personal bank accounts. The truth is that the e-mail sender information has been faked or "spoofed." Whereas traditional phishing scams are designed to steal information from individuals, spear phishing scams work to gain access to a company's entire computer system. The original spear fishing limited to the financial sector for a number of listed companies or the behavior of amateur hackers, but recently the United States Association for Network Security System (SANS Institute) warning, a spear phishing may become international espionage and intelligence activities in a way. They discovered many phishing e-mail attacks of professional models that do not look like amateur hackers, and this is very organized. The suspected motive is not pure; there may be mastermind behind the scheme. Whatever behinds the scene, commercial secrets and national defense secrets are the most serious things we should protect. It will cause irreparable harm to companies or the public. Because hackers are hiding in a dark place, passive prevention is just basic, the auditing is more important to the private companies or public organizations of information access control. In addition to entities outside the control of information, the e-mail content filtering is most important and popular one. Whether outbound or inbound e-mails have to go through the e-mail firewall scanning and confirm no confidential contents before they are allowed to pass through. Even a personal computer inadvertently has been inserted Trojans, data will not be compromised.

Encountering these internet threats, Cellopoint lab suggests that the first thing to do certainly is to develop a complete set of security-control policies and patches enforcement to staff computers. Not only prevention, making timely response measures to prepare for data leakage from inadvertently infected computer. Such as adding an e-mail security auditing and monitoring mechanisms in the last hurdle. Even if employees' computers were compromised and embedded with the Trojan, we could first stop leakage of confidential information at gateway level before computers were inserted Trojan, as an extra key or another layer of protection to avoid regrettable occurrence.