Know the Difference Between Phishing and Spear Phishing
There are currently 12 types of cybercrime; one you should really watch out for is phishing. Another is spear phishing, which is a type of phishing.
Do you know the difference between phishing vs spear phishing? If not, then read on to find out their characteristics.
Phishing
A phishing attack’s primary goal is to get you to reveal your sensitive data. To facilitate this, cybercriminals make fake emails or websites; this is called spoofing.
Since the fake emails and websites look so real, victims try to either click on malicious links or log in. Their login credentials are sent to the scammers, who use the information to potentially access accounts on other sites. They can also receive credit card numbers and bank account information.
MORE : What is a Phishing Email?
Spear phishing
Spear phishing is a targeted phishing attack. While phishing emails are sent en masse, spear phishing emails are sent to just one person or organization. Cybercriminals still want login credentials, but they aim for something much higher: trade secrets. These they can sell for a large sum of money.
MORE : Spear Phishing Examples
What’s the difference?
The main difference is this: phishing is low-effort and not tailored to every victim. Spear phishing takes much more work but is significantly more rewarding when successful hence spear phishing prevention is important. There are only a handful of victims involved in spear phishing attack, while there are scores of victims with phishing.
Be wary of every email
It may be easy to see the difference between phishing and spear phishing now, but actual attacks can be difficult to identify. The phishing prevention best practice is, therefore, to treat every email as suspicious.
But you can also install phishing prevention software so you won’t have to waste time scrutinizing every single email and worry about how to protect from phishing. It’ll send spoofed emails to the trash and genuine ones to your inbox, which can save you from doing it yourself manually.
Join the thousands of organizations that use DuoCircle
Find out how affordable it is for your organization today and be pleasantly surprised.