Spear phishing is a type of phishing that focuses on specific targets using personal information to increase the likelihood of success.

You get an email from your boss asking for your tax information. Maybe the message comes from an unsecured address, or some of the words are misspelled. It seems too fishy to be legit, but your tax info is due in a few hours, so you don’t have a lot of time to think. The real question is: Is this a phishing scam or a spear phishing attempt?

Spear phishing is a custom-made cyberattack that uses personal information about its target to try and trick them into sharing sensitive data. It is, for all intents and purposes, the craftiest of phishing scams. But unlike phishing, it’s designed to ensnare its targets by having a personal touch. 

A key difference between the two is, quite literally, target selection. Hackers put a lot more time and effort into spear phishing campaigns. While a typical phishing email might have a generic message directed at thousands of people at once, a spear phishing email will be sent to specific people with particular messages in mind. This makes it an elevated risk for senior executives, a group that’s often targeted in what’s known as “whaling,” but we’ll save that for another post.

75% of all cyber incidents start with a deceptive email. 

The truth about spear phishing is this: It preys on one element that technology is powerless against—human psychology. Understanding how spear phishing works helps organizations recognize the tactics attackers use, from social engineering to exploiting human trust and authority. Trust is the weapon. The message looks like it’s from your boss. From a colleague. From a vendor who sends you invoices. The phrasing is familiar. It’s sent at an expected time. It all makes sense… until it doesn’t.

Social engineering fuels the attack. Cybercriminals scrape LinkedIn, company websites, social media—any source that reveals information about companies, hierarchies, and relationships. They lurk. They learn. They wait for the right moment to strike. 

Threat actors know the psychological buttons to push, whether it’s a sense of urgency, authority, or helpfulness. In the time it takes you to send over those credentials, wire money to an incorrect account, or unwittingly download malware onto your system, you’ve been compromised.

So what does spear phishing actually look like in the real world? In terms of costly attacks, Business Email Compromise (BEC) schemes are near the top of the list.

Here’s an example: You get an email from your CEO asking you to urgently process a wire transfer for an acquisition that needs to happen ASAP. The email address seems like it belongs to the CEO (or at least it’s close), the signature is correct, and you’ve handled similar requests in the past. So you do it. Well done, you just transferred $50,000 to a criminal’s account in a foreign country.

Another favorite is the all too familiar invoice scam. You receive an email from a vendor you regularly pay, completed with an attached invoice that includes new bank details for the transfer. “Nothing unusual here,” you think to yourself, so you make the payment. Meanwhile, that vendor’s email has been compromised for weeks, and the attackers have been monitoring your payment activity in preparation for this attack.

Bogus invoices and BEC attacks like the above aren’t fictional. In fact, they happen every single day across industries. And they cost a lot of money. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center reports billions of dollars in losses from BEC attacks alone. 

Want to learn more? Read this to learn how spear phishing compares to other phishing attacks.

This is what’s frustrating: Your old security stack, spam filter, antivirus, legacy email gateway—those systems were designed for traditional threats. Known malicious signatures. Suspicious links. Obvious red flags. A spear phishing email often checks none of those boxes.

Spam filters are great at recognizing unsolicited bulk messages, but your spear phishing

messages will be crafted to look 100% legitimate. No malicious attachments? Check. No sketchy links? Check. Correct SPF/DKIM/DMARC authentication? Check—often, since the attacker either compromised a legitimate account or spoofed one cleverly.

Your antivirus solutions hunt malware, but spear phishing attacks often don’t contain any. Credential theft, social engineering manipulation—these attacks often leave no payload to scan.

Legacy defenses work on signatures and patterns. They react, they don’t anticipate. They can’t read context. An email might technically pass all SPF/DKIM/DMARC checks, but it can still feel wrong. Is it technically valid? Maybe. Is it actually suspicious? You bet.

The sophistication gap is real. Attackers use AI to mimic writing patterns and generate their own convincing fakes. They track email chains, wait days to join conversations, and then move strategically.

“We’re seeing convincing deepfake audio used in wire fraud, generative AI powering phishing emails that evade detection, and attackers social engineering their way past identity verification.” 

—Prakash Ramamurthy


Huntress Chief Product Officer

You need a combination of technical controls and human vigilance. A strong spear phishing security strategy ensures that even if attackers target your organization with custom emails, your defenses minimize the risk. Cybersecurity awareness training is key, but it has to be more than “click here if you spot a phish” quizzes. Train your users on why these attacks work, how to double-check requests, and what real urgency looks like versus artificially created urgency.

Enable multi-factor authentication (MFA) everywhere. Even if attackers steal credentials, MFA adds an additional layer of protection, making it more difficult for hackers to access your account. Enable and actually monitor email authentication protocols and deploy advanced email security solutions that use behavioral analysis, machine learning, and AI to catch what signature-based solutions miss.

Deploy endpoint detection and response (EDR) solutions to spot post-compromise behaviors. If someone in your organization falls for a spear phishing attack, you need visibility into what’s going on next: Any suspicious processes that get run, any anomalous network connections being made, and credential access that looks unusual. Centralized logging through a SIEM helps correlate security events across systems, revealing attack patterns that often hide in the noise.

But point solutions only take you so far. To really defend against modern spear phishing, you need a holistic view of your entire environment. Check out some practical tips for defending against phishing.

Huntress Managed Security Awareness Training (SAT), Managed EDR, and Managed Identity Threat Detection and Response (ITDR) combine to create a unified threat management strategy that protects your organization in multiple ways.

Training programs prepare your people for threats with interactive simulations and practical, actionable training, not generic training modules, even under pressure. 

Managed EDR delivers endpoint visibility and response when someone inevitably clicks the wrong link. Managed ITDR protects against identity-based attacks, detecting credential misuse and other suspicious authentication behavior that can indicate a compromised user account.

Together, this suite of tools closes the gaps in your security posture. After all, it’s a fact of modern life that attacks will happen. The key is detecting them early and stopping them before they become a breach.