Technology

A targeted phishing email is usually pretty sophisticated and requires days or weeks of research. For example, you might send an email pretending to be from someone's IT department regarding a hardware audit, and ask a user to report back with the barcode sticker on their laptop, providing them with a photo of an example tag in similar format. You'll pretend to be a specific individual at the company, or a contractor the company actually uses, and show knowledge of the internal software and hardware, and refer to other real employees by name/email to establish trust. Most of this data will be scraped from publicly available sources like LinkedIn profiles, job listings, and photos shared on social media by employees. This process is called OSINT (Open-Source Intelligence) and it's a fascinating rabbithole to read about. Targeted phishing attempts are much, much more sophisticated than the ones you'll see in spam email.