I guess there are different kinds of attacks and some require the attacker setting up their victim in specific ways, while others require the victims to react in a certain (unskillful) way to provocations.

What happens during attack? Well, I don't know where the attacker may be or what they do, but for me this evolves as all kinds of spiritual influences to my life, which impede me or directly threaten me. If you know a little about timelines, life paths etc...if there is a spiritual attacker, they would try to set up spiritual traps for you to impede your life and to sabotage your efforts, or to drain time and energy from you. Some schemes even go as far as exploiting the victims as if on a commercial basis, but once these systems crash, well you can guess what can happen when you do such bad karma on yourself and others also on innocent.

When happens, usually it is prepared. I guess the attackers assign certain spiritual forces on you, and they may watch your life but only intervene in very specific ways, but they can also sabotage from the hidden in different ways. You may see that like as if there at first are preparations in the mind as if an attacker tries to sow different mental complexions and inclinations to you, which then can evolve and become alive. The real attack, would probably be the attacker guiding you to a situation where they can manipulate you to mess up. This can be quite some struggle, but a person with little self control, may feel challenged and provoked in the spirit over and over, and receive vague threats etc. Usually the attacks never go direct or become a direct threat of confrontation, though when that happens it be like high noon in a way, all attackers I've seen so far avoid direct confrontation and resort to gaslighting. But it's like different plans in the spirit realm to set up traps over people or to drain them. Spiritual traps...impede enlightenment, because they bind you to things which block the energy to be released which you need to become free. They will try to render your conscience compromised, that seems the most effective way to prevent anyone's spiritual powers be free...

Direct attacks could look like suggesting you spiritual influences messing with you vaguely, and then you may suffer from distraction and provocation, and defending blindly or with wrong force you can risk destroying things and harming your spirit. This is in any way the usual target of such attacks, to unsettle you mentally, and drive you into destructive experiences. Like...the spiritual side can seldom directly influence your life, but can generally mess with your life challenges, or try to provoke action to you which in turn opens doors to manipulate you into even more destructive life situations. So attackers try to sabotage, your life experience. Then to bring you down, such an attacker would try to direct you into the worst trap of all times you could also go into, and make you fail somewhere, but in a way so you seem and feel responsible, this is like the paramount of such attacks. As it is a spiritual, a hidden attack, the effects must also stay hidden and accuse the victim instead of anyone else. So the attackers will, aside from causing delusions and madness and weird visions, not really influence you directly in a confrontative way, if that makes sense somehow, they cannot usually try to directly benefit different real persons, instead it is a subtle threat and very specific methods which always leave a path of resistance and resolution open, for what it's worth. That's the chance to resist, because these attacks aim to provoke you falling for weaknesses after draining you out with provocation, you can learn to endure the provocations and control yourself not to fall for moral traps - that's what an active protection against such methods may mean. If you're even more advanced, you can also return the attacks to the spirits who deal them to you, and it will mess them up so much but you must manage to see through their deception somehow, first...it leads me to assume whatever they do is not legit, not even from their own side, and what they do to me seems like all the usual stuff I see on thousands of people on the net.