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Arthur T. Knackerbracket writes in with a story from Computerworld:

If you work in finance or accounting and receive an email from your boss asking you to transfer some funds to an external account, you might want to think twice.

That's because so-called "whaling" attacks -- a refined kind of phishing in which hackers use spoofed or similar-sounding domain names to make it look like the emails they send are from your CFO or CEO -- are on the rise, according to security firm Mimecast.

If fact, 55 percent of the 442 IT professionals Mimecast surveyed this month said their organizations have seen an increase in the volume of whaling attacks over the past three months, the firm reported on Wednesday.

Those organizations spanned the U.S., U.K., South Africa and Australia.

Domain-spoofing is the most popular strategy, accounting for 70 percent of such attacks, Mimecast said; the majority pretend to be the CEO, but some 35 percent of organizations had seen whaling emails attributed to the CFO.

"Whaling emails can be more difficult to detect because they don't contain a hyperlink or malicious attachment, and rely solely on social engineering to trick their targets," said Orlando Scott-Cowley, a cybersecurity strategist with Mimecast.

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