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Spear Phishing Scams Essay

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Phishing scams are attacks by social engineers who pretend to be from a legitimate business or organization and use fear tactics to get the recipient to divulge sensitive information. Attackers use a variety of tactics to trick the recipient to believe these emails are legitimate most commonly by spoofing a website that appears to be genuine. Two types of phishing attacks are spear phishing and whaling. Spear phishing is where the attacker takes extreme measures to gather specific information about an individual in order to make the attacks seem more legitimate. Whaling is generally spear phishing targeted directly at high profile individuals. These attacks can be minimized by securely discarding information that could be used in such attacks.

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