Phishing

The previous chapter discussed phishing as an external reconnaissance technique used to obtain data from users in an organization. It was categorized as a social engineering method of reconnaissance. Phishing can, however, be used in two ways: it can be the precursor to an attack, or it can be an attack itself. As a reconnaissance attack, the hackers are mostly interested in getting information from users.

As was discussed, they might disguise themselves as a trustworthy third-party organization, such as a bank, and simply trick users into giving out secret information. They might also try to take advantage of a user's greed, emotions, fears, obsessions, and carelessness. However, when phishing is used as an actual attack to compromise a system, the phishing emails come carrying some payloads. Hackers may use attachments or links in the emails to compromise a user's computer. When the attack is done via attachments, users may be enticed into downloading an attached...