Firms report significant spike in ‘whaling’ attacks which is another variation of phishing attacks. Here the social engineer targets executives and high-profile targets. Information about executives and high-profile targets is easily accessible on the Internet.

A recent survey by Mimecast said that 55 per cent of firms experienced a whaling attack whereby a senior member of the finance team had received an email claiming to be from the company’s CEO, which attempted to con staff into transferring large sums of money out of the company’s accounts.

Such attacks – referred to as ‘whaling’ – have spiked over the last three months, according to a poll of approximately 400 IT professionals in the UK, US, South Africa and Australia.

The majority of whaling emails purport to come from the CEO, with 72 per cent making such claims, while 35 per cent attempt to convince recipients that they are the firm’s CFO.

The most popular attack method was domain spoofing, which accounted for 70 per cent of all whaling attacks.

The second most popular method, domain squatting, constituted only 16 per cent of attacks. A quarter of all attacks came from Gmail accounts while Yahoo and Hotmail proved far less popular, with eight per cent of attacks originating from each service.

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