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Spear Phishing: Catching the Big One

  • 3 August 2020
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Spear Phishing: Catching the Big One
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On deck in our types of phishing series: Spear phishing.

Where most phishing attacks cast a wide net, hoping to entice as many users as possible to take the bait, spear phishing involves heavy research of pre-defined, high-dollar target—like a CEO, founder, or public persona—often relying on publicly available information for a more convincing ruse.

FYI: When the target is sizeable enough, spear phishing is sometimes called ‘whaling.’

 

Landing the Big One

SIM swapping is a type of spear phishing where attackers phish a target’s phone carrier, pretending to be the target, and replacing the SIM card with one of their own. One such case resulted in $24 million of lost cryptocurrency.

 

Download the 11 Types of Phishing eBook

 

1 reply

MajorHavoc
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Userlevel 7
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I thought SIM Swapping is when the the attacker pretends to be the target with the phone provider, to obtain a “replacement SIM” For the target’s account, so they can take over the target’s phone number by putting the replacement SIM in their own phone. This let’s the attacker intercept two-factor authorizations now, and they can change passwords and drain accounts.  They do not “replace the SIM card for one of their own.”

- Owen Rubin,  Apple Expert. Worked in Vision Pro team and early Mac HW and OS engineer at Apple. Machines: 2017 iMac Pro 27" 5K 3GHz 10-Core Xenon Sonoma 14.x. 2023 14" MacBookPro M2 Max Ventura 13.x, 2018 16" MacBookPro Ventura 13.x, and a dozen or so older machines for testing. iPhone 14 Pro, iPhone 13 Pro, iPhone 6.

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