Many companies deploy highly sophisticated end-point security
controls to protect their networks. Nevertheless, targeted
attacks such as spear-phishing are an increasing threat
for knowledge workers because of their targeted precision. In
practice, the first step within an attack scenario is that the
attacker seeks publicly available information on the company's
Internet site and public profiles on social networks to
obtain precise information on the targeted victim. Then the
attacker constructs an e-mail using the gathered information
to gain the victim's trust. In general, such e-mails are only sent
to a carefully selected small group of people. In most cases,
they contain attachments with malicious software to provide
a remote control tool to the attacker. Zero-day exploits are a
good way of installing a backdoor via an existing vulnerability.
The remote control functionality is then used to harvest
sensitive information and to get into internal company networks.
In this section, we discuss three real-world spearphishing
attacks and their impact on knowledge workers