A form of phishing attack directed at specific companies or individuals. Cybercriminals disguise themselves as legitimate entities to extract sensitive data from their victims in the form of a phishing email or a malicious link. This social engineering technique is considered to be more dangerous because it can impact even tech-savvy individuals due to its personalized nature.
Spear phishing is a tailored attack targeted at a particular individual to get specific information or make them do a particular task, like transfer money to the attacker’s account. Phishing is a more general social engineering technique during which the criminals target as many people as possible in the hopes that at least one of them will slip up and interact with them.