Cybersecurity Glossary
Watering Hole Attack
An attack that compromises a website your team already visits, and waits for them to come to it.
What Watering Hole Attack means
Rather than sending anything to the target, the attacker takes over a site the target trusts and uses regularly, an industry association, a supplier portal, a local news page. Visitors are served malicious content from an address they have every reason to trust, which defeats the advice to only visit sites you know.
Why Watering Hole Attack matters for small businesses and nonprofits
Small organisations often share the same handful of sector specific sites, so one compromise reaches many of them at once. It is also the kind of attack nobody notices, because nothing arrived by email and nothing looked wrong.
What to do about Watering Hole Attack
- Keep browsers and their extensions patched, because this attack relies on an unpatched client
- Use DNS filtering so known malicious destinations fail before anything loads
- Ask suppliers who host portals you depend on how they patch and monitor them
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An attack that compromises a website your team already visits, and waits for them to come to it.