What Is Whaling Cyber Awareness? Expert Tips

Last Updated on 3 months by Touhid

What is Whaling Cyber Awareness? Cyber awareness is the key to defending against whaling phishing attacks. The data is often compromised because of the employee’s cyber awareness. In this post, we have provided the best cyber awareness practices for preventing whaling attacks.

What is Whaling Cyber Attack?

Phishing is a type of social engineering attack that aims to gain sensitive and confidential information such as usernames, passwords, credit card information, and network credentials. There are different types of phishing attacks such as deceptive phishing, spear phishing, clone phishing, website phishing, whaling, and CEO fraud.

Now, Whaling is a type of phishing attack that specifically targets wealthy, powerful, or senior management of an organization, such as the CEO, CFO, or top executives of the organization. It gains confidential information such as financial information, stealing money, or unauthorized access to computer systems.

For example, the cyber attacker sends an email to a victim, such as a CFO or CEO, requesting payment or asking for sensitive information. The attacker pretended to be a client of the trusted company because they used the victims’ title, position, and phone number.

What Is Whaling Cyber Awareness?

What Is Whaling Cyber Awareness? The whaling cyber awareness will ensure that employees of the organization are aware of a whaling attack. High executives of the organization keep sensitive information; that’s why they are the main targets of cyber hackers.

The attackers sent emails or phone messages to chief executives to hack secret data. If they are not conscious of whaling attacks, that means whether a message is legitimate or not, then the data may be compromised.

Make ensure that all employees from staff to executives are trained to identify the whaling phishing emails and what to do with phishing emails. The company may arrange training on cyber security awareness to develop the skills of the employees.

The following topics may include cyber awareness training:

• Introduction to Cyber-attacks and Cyber security.
• What are phishing attacks and types of phishing attacks?
• What is a whaling attack with examples?
• How to identify whaling phishing?
• How to protect from whaling attacks?
• How do keep secure data and information?
• Who are the main targets of whaling attacks?

1. Employee Cyber Awareness

What is whaling cyber awareness? Cyber awareness is the most important and it is required for each employee of an organization. Awareness can prevent any type of cyber security threat such as whaling attacks, email phishing, and spear phishing.

All employees of the organization (from high-level executives to lower-level employees) must be trained or aware of whaling cyber-attacks. They should know how to identify whaling attacks and how to prevent whaling cyber-attacks.

In the case of whaling attacks, top executives are the main target of whaling cyber-attacks.

2. Delete Suspicious Email

Deleting suspicious emails is another best practice of whaling cyber awareness. As a senior executive of an organization, you may receive an unwanted email from a cyber-attacker, the email seems to be suspicious or whaling phishing messages.

The email requests payment or asks for sensitive information from you or the e-mail may contain a malware script to redirect you to a vulnerable website to hack company information.

Expert Tips

• To prevent whaling phishing emails, just delete any email that raises doubt.
• If the email is suspicious then you can also directly communicate with the sender to confirm as he sends the mail.
• Mark the suspicious email as spam, and it is better not to click on the suspicious email.

3. Check the Correctness of Email

Deleting suspicious emails is another best practice for whaling cyber awareness. As a senior executive of an organization, you may receive an unwanted email from a cyber-attacker; the email seems to be suspicious or contains phishing messages.

The email requests, payments, or asks for sensitive information from you, or the e-mail may contain a malware script to redirect you to a vulnerable website to hack company information.

Expert Tips

• To prevent whaling phishing emails, just delete any email that raises doubt.
• If the email is suspicious then you can also directly communicate with the sender to confirm as he sends the email.
• Mark the suspicious email as spam, and it is better not to click on the suspicious email.

4. Don’t Download Suspicious Email Attachments

What is whaling cyber awareness best practice? Don’t download suspicious email attachments is another best practice for whaling cyber awareness. As a senior executive of an organization, when you receive a phishing e-mail with an attachment file, then don’t download the attachment file.

The attachment files may be infected with a virus or malware script to hack your system as well as steal your sensitive information.

5. Never Click on Suspicious Email Links 

A whaling cyber attacker may send you a phishing e-mail that may contain a suspicious link to redirect to an attacker-targeted or malicious website to compromise the company’s data. The URL looks legitimate, but if you mouse hover over a hyperlink carefully then you can see that the link is fraudulent or redirected to another vulnerable website.

High-level executives of the organization should be aware of suspicious email links and whaling attacks. Top executives are the main targets of cyber attackers because they keep sensitive information confidential.

6. Enter Information Only on the Secure Website

As an extension of cyber security awareness, ensure top-level executives to low-level employees are aware of website security. As a senior executive, when you need to provide information about your organization on a website, you have to make sure that the site is secured by an SSL certificate.

In the web browser URL, the website address will start with HTTPS instead of HTTP, such as https://www.google.com/. Even, when you browse or download any documents from a website you have to confirm the site is also secured by an SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate.

7. Install Antivirus Software

Another best practice for whaling cyber awareness is to install antivirus software. It is suggested that, install professional anti-virus software on all computers and keep updating the software regularly.

As we know, antivirus is software or program that helps to protect your computer from viruses, and malware. If your computer is infected by a virus or malware then you should immediately install antivirus software and scan the files on your computer.

Here is a list of some best professional anti-virus software:

• Bitdefender
• Norton
• Kaspersky
• Panda
• ESET
• Avast
• AVG

8. Social Media Awareness

Social engineering attackers use the whale phishing technique in order to gain the information of CEOs or top executives from social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Cyber-criminals choose the social media platform because it holds enough information about an employee. So, top executives should restrict the privacy policy to access their personal and professional information.

Conclusion

A whaling phishing attack or whaling attack is a type of cyber-attack that steals sensitive information from high-level executives of an organization. There is some personally identifiable information (PII) considered cyber awareness, such as name, Social Security number (SSN), driving license, phone number, passport number, bank account number, and email address.

So, the top executive should be aware of personally identifiable information. In this article, we have discussed “What is Whaling Attack” and “What is whaling cyber awareness”, hope the article will be helpful for you.