Spear phishing is when fraudsters use any information they already attained about you – such as your date of birth or place of work – to make scams targeting you much more effective. Phishing is one level of threat but this on a whole different level.
This year in England, we’ve seen large-scale data breaches at popular retailers and brands such as Marks and Spencer, Co-Op and Harrods, with fraudsters getting their hands on a lot of information, including emails and passwords for accounts at the brands they have deliberately targeted.
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We’ll most likely continue to see data breaches like this into 2026 and beyond, as hackers sharpen their methods to infiltrate systems. With these attacks, we could see more sophisticated spear-phishing attempts that include much more data about you.
Which? has already warned about one-time passcode scams, where lowlife fraudsters used personal data to attempt to access people’s O2 accounts before ringing them and conning them into revealing one-time passcodes.
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The victims were convinced by the fraudsters to state their one-time passcodes, unfortunately they didn’t realise they were giving away full access to their O2 accounts.
More data breaches are inevitable allowing these lowlife thieves to use the information gleaned from these break-ins to carry out more versions of the same scam, attempting to access your accounts with some data on you, before manipulating you into giving them the rest of the information they need.
Spear-phishing is higher level of cyber attack, they are not cold calling and trying to prise information out of you, they already have it, but not enough. If they find out more about you particularly financial details then you are seriously compromised.
These bunch of cyber criminals have done the groundwork now they all they need to do is go for the kill.Also see: Wise Up To The Scammers
