Is your group’s senior management susceptible to a cyber-harpooning? Discover ways to maintain them protected.
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 risk actors to hijack his e-mail account. From there they moved swiftly, authorizing cash transfers on Fagan’s behalf for faux invoices they despatched to the hedge fund.
In complete, they authorised $8.7 million price of invoices on this method. The incident was finally the undoing of Levitas Capital, after it compelled 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 workforce. It may come within the type of a phishing/smishing/vishing effort, or a enterprise e-mail compromise (BEC) try. The primary 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 sometimes:
- Quick 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 change off or bypass safety controls like multifactor authentication (MFA) to save lots of time
- Extremely seen on-line. This allows risk actors to reap data with which to craft convincing social engineering assaults, comparable 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 very good likelihood of success. This implies risk actors are more likely to carry out detailed reconnaissance on their goal. There must be no scarcity of publicly out there data to assist them, together with social media accounts, their firm web site, media interviews and keynote movies.
Other than 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, comparable to M&A exercise or firm occasions. It could additionally assist the risk actor to grasp their private pursuits, and even communication fashion if the top objective is to impersonate the “whale.”
As soon as they’ve this data, the adversary will normally craft a spear phishing or BEC e-mail. It’ll most certainly be spoofed to seem as if despatched from a trusted supply. And it’ll use the traditional social engineering tactic of making urgency in order that the recipient is extra more likely to rush their choice making.
The top objective is typically to trick the sufferer into divulging their logins, or unwittingly putting in infostealing malware and spy ware. These credentials could possibly be used to entry monetizable company secrets and techniques. Or to hijack their e-mail account as a way to launch BEC assaults at subordinates impersonating the whale to get a smaller fish to make a giant cash switch. Alternatively, the fraudster might pose because the “whale’s” boss, as a way to trick them into green-lighting a fund switch.
AI modifications the foundations
Sadly, AI is making these duties even simpler for the unhealthy guys. Utilizing jailbroken LLMs or open supply fashions, they will leverage AI instruments to reap giant portions of information on targets as a way 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 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, as a way to persuade the goal to make a cash switch. With AI, whaling assaults enhance in scale and effectiveness, as refined capabilities grow to be democratized to extra risk actors.
The large payoff
What’s at stake right here ought to go with out saying. A serious BEC assault may outcome within the lack of tens of millions of {dollars}’ price of income. And a breach of delicate company knowledge might result in regulatory fines, class motion lawsuits, and operational disruption.
The reputational harm might be even worse, as Levitas Capital came upon. The hedge fund was, in the long run, capable of block a lot of the authorised transactions. However that wasn’t sufficient to cease one in all 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 will help to mitigate the dangers of spearphishing and BEC assaults. However these aren’t all the time profitable when confronted with a senior govt who may assume the foundations don’t apply to them. For this reason executive-specific coaching workout routines involving simulations are so necessary. They need to be extremely personalised and stored to brief, manageable classes incorporating the most recent risk actor TTPs, together with deepfake video/audio.
These must 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 another known-good channel.
AI instruments may 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 may present some helpful resilience. By implementing least privilege and just-in-time entry it would 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 sort 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 fingers of the numerous, not the few.
