How to Stop Your Executives From Being Harpooned

InfoWorld — Last year, a senior executive in charge of customer satisfaction at his company opened an email with the subject "customer complaint" that appeared to be sent from the Better Business Bureau. He followed a link to see details of the complaint. "If he had stopped to examine the URL carefully, he would have seen that it was a trap" -- known as a whaling attack and based on spear-phishing techniques -- intended to gather information about the company, says Jonathan Gossels, president of SystemExperts, a security consulting firm. "But during a busy work day, that hardly happens."

In another recent case, an attacker researched the background of a systems administrator, then sent him an email about a reduced premium health care plan for families of four or more. This appealed to the administrator, who has five children, and enticed him to open the attached form. The form had embedded malware that compromised the target's computer and gave the attacker a foothold into his corporate network. It also allowed the attacker to impersonate the administrator and garner sensitive information about the company's operations, says Rohyt Belani, CEO of Intrepidus Group, a security consulting and training firm.

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These whaling attacks are a form of personalized phishing, or spear phishing, aimed at senior executives or others in an organization who have access to lots of valuable or competitive information. While phishers generally go after consumers for bank account data, passwords, credit card numbers, and the like for financial gain, whalers most often target people who have inside information or can provide ongoing access to systems. Thus, the cost of being harpooned can be huge.

Whaling attacks are harder to detect than phishing expeditions. There's no obvious signature to detect as in phishing, such as seeing hundreds of copies of a phishing email enter your server. Whaling attacks are also hard to defend against because they often play on executives' feelings and sense of self-importance.

And security experts say these types of attacks are on the rise.

"As more private information becomes public, through social media sites and otherwise, targeting specific individuals within companies has become easier for hackers and thus a preferred method of attack," says Kim Peretti, a director in the forensic services practice at the PricewaterhouseCoopers consulting firm.

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