Email Security Blog

What is Spear Phishing?

According to Statista, IT Security spending in 2018 in the United States alone will reach $66B  an incredible number.

As a CISO you likely contributed handsomely to that pot, but no matter how locked down your house is, your biggest threats are likely sitting in your own office.

Spear Phishing attacks are the most potent and the most popular among cyber criminals targeting corporations. No verticals are safe, no business type or size immune. While Phishing alone casts a wide generic net and hopes to scoop a lot of people quickly, Spear Phishing is, as the name implies, a target-focused activity.

 Spear Phishing attacks are generally targeted to one or two people in an organization. Unlike regular phishing emails they aren’t always smash and grab, sometimes a rapport is created with a victim, perhaps a legitimate transaction is made or a mutually beneficial exchange of information occurs. By the time the actual attack occurs, your team have walked wide-eyed and willingly into the jaws of a shark.

 The entire Phishing enterprise has a singular goal in mind – to defraud and benefit. The Spear Phisher focuses those efforts to build confidence in their victims in a corporate a successful attack can utterly devastate a corporation.

Every company today has a web presence and most employees interact socially on sites like LinkedIn. While our virtual storefronts and networking groups are invaluable, the last 20 years have greatly increased the potential to manipulate and exploit you workforce.

Early attempts at detecting and flagging suspect incoming emails involved a combination of training and often bulky third party applications that caught legitimate email almost as much as what it perceived to be spam and phish, and sadly many of the current phishing remediation platforms still require a hefty and obtrusive config and are limited in their compatibility options. Further, while important, training is only as good as the efficacy of the trainer, the relevance of its content, and most critically, the attention span of the trainee.

At Inky we’ve invested millions of dollars into something a little different. Inky Phish Fence is the most effective barrier to all flavors of phish: we blend computer vision, machine learning, and artificial intelligence to make the most novel solution on the market. 

Inky Phish Fence is compatible with all major email platforms, can be installed by a even a junior I.T. resource with minimal time and training, has no impact on email performance and critically provides email users a clean descriptive assessment of every email every time.

Inky – we throw the phish back.

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