What type of social engineering targets particular groups of people?

Question: What type of social engineering targets particular groups of people?

Answer: spear phishing.

Spear phishing is a pretexted email attack that singles out individuals or corporate bodies within an organization. Contrasting with the wide scope contained in numerous phishing campaigns, spear phishing attacks are specifically narrowed, customized and pinpointed to the victims in question. Such attackers regularly acquire in-depth target information, which is further useful in design of appropriate emails or messages aimed at fooling the employee in to providing their sensitive information. Bringing out the fact that the attackers do their due diligence like collecting detailed information about their intended target, such as their roles, interests and online activities among others to personalize their communication is one way of achieving the convincing and customized phishing emails or messages. Many of these messages can portray being from reliable sources, or have information which is related to the reader, thus causing them to click on the trap. Spear phishing intends to utilize an element of trust to direct the attacks to specific groups of people and/or individuals, in order to stealthily gain unauthorized access to private information and computer systems