What Is Whaling In Cyber Security?
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What Is Whaling in Cyber Security?
Answer: Whaling is the type of phishing attack that targets the executives’ officers, for masquerading as a legitimate email. It is a digital fraud that occurs through social engineering and by manipulating the victims by initiating fund transfers.
Whaling enforces the manager or the chief to steal personal information from the company. It is also referring as the whaling phishing attack. The whaling derived from the attack size and the whales in the company is selected by the given authorities to the employees.
As their targets are big that’s why it is difficult to detect them. In organizations, security officers reduce their attacks with the help of the information security training program among employees. Whaling attacks encourage targets to provide sensitive or commercial information with the emails, content spoofing, such as the hackers sending an email that appear from a trusted company or individual and they also use the website that is developed to contain the malware and use it as a source to attack.
The emails or the websites for the whaling attacks are specially built and also have target names, task statuses, and other types of information needed for the attack. Because the attackers are already prepared the detection is very difficult for the whaling attack.
Whaling attacks often occur through social engineering methods such as links on websites or attachments that contain the virus infecting the target system or getting the authorized data. High-ranking officers like CEOs are the main target because they can be used in fraudulent funds transfers with the help of BEC (Business email compromise). Sometimes the CEO of the company can be manipulated and ask the employees to move with the transactions.
These are the cyber crimes that can easily fool the targets because the hacker did a lot of effort to develop them to achieve a lot in return. The social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter are mostly used by hackers to get information on their target to make the attack successful.