The little fish are going after the big fish
One might think that large companies already have reliable protection in order to avoid the likes of above-mentioned instances, yet reality shows that the situation is exactly the opposite. Individual users are most often targeted by hackers, and the more users that work at a company, the more likely it is for someone to accidentally take the bait. The cyber espionage campaign ‘Operation Cloud Hopper’ is a famous example of this method which initially was mainly focused on Asian corporations, but now also targets numerous large companies across the globe.
The method revolves around a technique known as “spear phishing”, which is based on the idea that one of the large numbers of targeted employees will likely be careless enough to click on a link sent via e-mail or provide their password. If a hacker manages to get hold of the key data of a user, they will practically have free access to the mail server, allowing them to get to the system administrator. If this succeeds, the door will be open to the company’s internal systems, allowing them to release valuable data using various techniques.

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Since it’s clear that most grand-scale data phishing schemes are based on the vulnerability of individual users, together with my colleague, doctoral candidate Barnabás Sándor, we prepared a study to specifically survey techniques developed for this purpose. In order to receive as much scam e-mail as possible, we intentionally set out to make all the possible mistakes in online data protection. We responded to letters from spammers, made our phone number and e-mail address publicly available and subscribed to publicly available newsletters. By reconstructing the typical mistakes of users, we made ourselves the perfect target for spam and phishing campaigns.
The pressure various phishing e-mails or unsolicited content put on the average user is constant: Kaspersky’s survey showing the share of spam in the overall volume of e-mails provides an interesting overview on the subject. Based on this, it’s safe to say that even in milder months, the share of spam in the e-mail traffic of a common user is barely below 50 percent. Therefore, there’s a substantial likelihood that someone will carelessly expose themselves to a data breach attempt.