Is your group’s senior management susceptible to a cyber-harpooning? Learn 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 concept of the company carnage that was to observe. That invite was booby-trapped with malware, enabling risk 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 complete, they authorised $8.7 million value of invoices on this approach. The incident was in the end the undoing of Levitas Capital, after it pressured the exit of one of many agency’s largest shoppers.
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 group. It may 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” engaging targets? In any case, there are fewer of them to victimize than common workers. Three key attributes stand out. Senior executives (together with the C-suite) are usually:
- Brief on time, which 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 taking a look at it correctly. They might additionally swap off or bypass safety controls like multifactor authentication (MFA) to avoid wasting time
- Extremely seen on-line. This allows risk actors to reap data with which to craft convincing social engineering assaults, similar 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 appear to be?
Identical to a daily spear phishing or BEC assault, whaling requires a certain quantity of groundwork to face likelihood of success. This implies risk actors are prone 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.
Apart from the fundamentals, they’ll wish to know data on key subordinates and colleagues, or company data that could possibly be used as a pretext for social engineering, similar to M&A exercise or firm occasions. It might additionally assist the risk actor to grasp their private pursuits, and even communication type if the top 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 most definitely 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 prone to rush their resolution making.
The top purpose is typically 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 with the intention to launch BEC assaults at subordinates impersonating the whale to get a smaller fish to make an enormous cash switch. Alternatively, the fraudster might pose because the “whale’s” boss, with the intention to trick them into green-lighting a fund switch.
AI adjustments the principles
Sadly, AI is making these duties even simpler for the dangerous guys. Utilizing jailbroken LLMs or open supply fashions, they will leverage AI instruments to reap massive portions of knowledge on targets with the intention to help with sufferer reconnaissance. After which use generative AI (GenAI) to create convincing emails or texts in flawless pure language. These instruments may even be used so as to add helpful context and/or mimic the writing type 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, with the intention to persuade the goal to make a cash switch. With AI, whaling assaults enhance in scale and effectiveness, as subtle capabilities turn out to be democratized to extra risk actors.
The massive payoff
What’s at stake right here ought to go with out saying. A serious BEC assault may end result within the lack of hundreds of thousands of {dollars}’ value of income. And a breach of delicate company knowledge might result in regulatory fines, class motion lawsuits, and operational disruption.
The reputational injury may be even worse, as Levitas Capital came upon. The hedge fund was, in the long run, capable of block many of the authorised transactions. However that wasn’t sufficient to cease certainly one of its largest shoppers from strolling, bringing down the $75 million fund within the course of. On a extra private stage, duped executives are sometimes scapegoated by their superiors following incidents like these.
Taking out the whalers
There are a number of methods safety groups might help to mitigate the dangers of spearphishing and BEC assaults. However these aren’t at all times profitable when confronted with a senior govt who may suppose the principles don’t apply to them. For this reason executive-specific coaching workouts involving simulations are so vital. They need to be extremely customized and stored to quick, manageable classes incorporating the newest risk actor TTPs, together with deepfake video/audio.
These ought to be backed by improved safety controls and processes. This might embody a strict approvals course of for big-money fund transfers, probably requiring log off by two people and/or verification by means of another known-good channel.
AI instruments may also 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 probably malicious calls in actual time. A Zero Belief method may additionally present some helpful resilience. By imposing least privilege and just-in-time entry it can reduce what executives can entry, and guarantee their logins are by no means trusted by default.
Extra typically, your group might wish to begin limiting the form of company data it shares publicly. In a world the place AI is all over the place, the means to search out and weaponize such data is now within the palms of the various, not the few.
