Is your group’s senior management susceptible to a cyber-harpooning? Discover ways to maintain them secure.
09 Dec 2025
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5 min. learn
When a hedge fund supervisor opened up an innocuous Zoom assembly invite, he had little thought of the company carnage that was to observe. That invite was booby-trapped with malware, enabling menace actors to hijack his e-mail account. From there they moved swiftly, authorizing cash transfers on Fagan’s behalf for pretend invoices they despatched to the hedge fund.
In whole, they accepted $8.7 million value of invoices on this method. The incident was in the end the undoing of Levitas Capital, after it pressured the exit of one of many agency’s largest purchasers.
Sadly, focusing on of senior execs like this isn’t unusual. Why hassle with the little fish when whales can elicit such riches?
What’s whaling?
Put merely, a whaling cyberattack is one focused at a high-profile, senior member of the company management crew. It might come within the type of a phishing/smishing/vishing effort, or a enterprise e-mail compromise (BEC) try. The principle differentiator from a typical spearphishing or BEC assault is the goal.
Why are “whales” enticing targets? In any case, there are fewer of them to victimize than common staff. Three key attributes stand out. Senior executives (together with the C-suite) are usually:
- Brief on time, that means they might click on by means of on a phishing e-mail, open a malicious attachment or approve a fraudulent switch request with out it correctly. They could additionally change off or bypass safety controls like multifactor authentication (MFA) to avoid wasting time
- Extremely seen on-line. This allows menace actors to reap data with which to craft convincing social engineering assaults, equivalent to emails spoofed to return from a subordinate or PA
- Empowered to entry extremely delicate and profitable company data (e.g., IP and monetary knowledge), and to approve or request big-money transfers
What does a typical assault seem like?
Identical to a daily spear phishing or BEC assault, whaling requires a specific amount of groundwork to face a superb probability of success. This implies menace actors are more likely to carry out detailed reconnaissance on their goal. There ought to be no scarcity of publicly accessible data to assist them, together with social media accounts, their firm web site, media interviews and keynote movies.
Except for the fundamentals, they’ll need to know data on key subordinates and colleagues, or company data that could possibly be used as a pretext for social engineering, equivalent to M&A exercise or firm occasions. It could additionally assist the menace actor to grasp their private pursuits, and even communication fashion if the tip purpose is to impersonate the “whale.”
As soon as they’ve this data, the adversary will often craft a spear phishing or BEC e-mail. It’s going to almost certainly be spoofed to seem as if despatched from a trusted supply. And it’ll use the basic social engineering tactic of making urgency in order that the recipient is extra more likely to rush their determination making.
The top purpose is usually to trick the sufferer into divulging their logins, or unwittingly putting in infostealing malware and adware. These credentials could possibly be used to entry monetizable company secrets and techniques. Or to hijack their e-mail account so as to launch BEC assaults at subordinates impersonating the whale to get a smaller fish to make an enormous cash switch. Alternatively, the fraudster could pose because the “whale’s” boss, so as to trick them into green-lighting a fund switch.
AI modifications the principles
Sadly, AI is making these duties even simpler for the dangerous guys. Utilizing jailbroken LLMs or open supply fashions, they’ll leverage AI instruments to reap massive portions of knowledge on targets so as to help with sufferer reconnaissance. After which use generative AI (GenAI) to create convincing emails or texts in flawless pure language. These instruments might even be used so as to add helpful context and/or mimic the writing fashion of the sender.
GenAI can be utilized to leverage deepfake tech for extremely convincing vishing assaults, and even to craft movies impersonating high-level executives, so as to persuade the goal to make a cash switch. With AI, whaling assaults improve in scale and effectiveness, as subtle capabilities grow to be democratized to extra menace actors.
The massive payoff
What’s at stake right here ought to go with out saying. A significant BEC assault might consequence within the lack of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}’ value of income. And a breach of delicate company knowledge could result in regulatory fines, class motion lawsuits, and operational disruption.
The reputational harm may be even worse, as Levitas Capital discovered. The hedge fund was, in the long run, capable of block many of the accepted transactions. However that wasn’t sufficient to cease one among its largest purchasers from strolling, bringing down the $75 million fund within the course of. On a extra private degree, duped executives are sometimes scapegoated by their superiors following incidents like these.
Taking out the whalers
There are a number of methods safety groups can assist to mitigate the dangers of spearphishing and BEC assaults. However these aren’t all the time profitable when confronted with a senior government who may assume the principles don’t apply to them. This is the reason executive-specific coaching workout routines involving simulations are so vital. They need to be extremely customized and stored to quick, manageable classes incorporating the most recent menace actor TTPs, together with deepfake video/audio.
These ought to be backed by improved safety controls and processes. This might embrace a strict approvals course of for big-money fund transfers, doubtlessly requiring log off by two people and/or verification by means of an alternate known-good channel.
AI instruments also can assist community defenders. Contemplate AI-based e-mail safety designed to identify suspicious patterns of communication, senders, and content material. And deepfake detection software program to flag doubtlessly malicious calls in actual time. A Zero Belief method can also present some helpful resilience. By imposing least privilege and just-in-time entry it should reduce what executives can entry, and guarantee their logins are by no means trusted by default.
Extra usually, your group could need to begin limiting the sort of company data it shares publicly. In a world the place AI is in every single place, the means to seek out and weaponize such data is now within the arms of the numerous, not the few.
