Spear Phishing Becomes Scary in Emails

Spear Phishing is when you receive an email from someone you know would not send you an email as a scam. Therefore, you are more likely to open because you know the person sending the message.Recently the Google had discovered an attempt to hack into many gmail accounts using Spear Phishing. These accounts included the email passwords of many government officials, important people in the country, and people with access to top secret information. This form of cyber attacking has becomes increasingly popular in the recent months. Symantec, a major computer security firm mentions in the article that in the month of march they intercepted 85 attacks per day using Spear Phishing tactics. I think this applies to everyone who is participating in email or other social media sites because we all need to be careful about what we open in emails, and what we allow in the inbox. One way to do this is to set the inbox setting to "exclusive" which sends email not from you contacts immediately into the junk mail folder. Also, I think people need to be more careful about the passwords which guard email accounts. Never use the same password for many social media sites, email accounts, or other websites which require passwords. Even though it can be very hard to eliminate spear phishing, but by being more careful with emails and passwords, users can help diffuse the risk