you know the computer thing is it plugged in?
In the last two months I have gotten about a dozen emails on my work account that tripped enough red flags for me to think they were phishing attempts. It turns out that they were all legit and failure to respond could be determental to still working there. Good thing our boss was looking out for us.
What I have learned is that I should respond to any half-assed email and ignore the years of annual training I've recieved to the contrary.
I just mark any slughtly fishy mail as phising and send it to the helpdesk. Either I get s thank you back, or a „its legit“. either way, I dont need to worry about it anymore
I've definitely gotten good at identifying phishing attempts from our Cybersecurity team.
Lol that person is stupid. these test phishing mails are super easy to spot. I hope they don't work in tech
If the email did indeed originate from the company you work for, they owe you a gas card. Employers can't offer you money or benefits as a practical joke and then just say "April Fools!" There are laws regarding offers from your employer for compensation and benefits.
You guys read your emails?
Corporate does this all the time to at my work.
The GM of my office came talk to me because I had actually won like employee of the quarter or something, but when I got the email with the "redeem here for your $50 gift card" I reported it as phishing. I asked him why they couldn't just go to the grocery store and hand me a physical gift card, he blinked for a moment like that hadn't occurred to him. I showed him the quarantined emails I get on Outlook every day from dozens of phishing attempts made to my work email everyday.
You can tell it's fake because it suggests that corporate would just hand you a new benefit out of the blue.
I'm on our cybersecurity team and our last phishing sim was so real looking and legit sounding I thought it was real, and I knew the phish was coming. The only indicator was the sender email was a slight misspelling of Microsoft. I pointed out that that phish is not a fair phish, our users are not going to meticulously examine every email for microscopic indicators. Half if them are barely tech literate, but they're doctors or nurses and only know what they need to know to do their job. Our cybersecurity lead was completely in "wtf are you talking about? From Micrasoft.com is totally illegitimate" mode, I had to point out that our users flag 70% of the emails as phish, and phishing tests that look like completely legitimate emails aside from a single character out of place in an obscure location most of our users aren't even thinking if looking at undermine legitimate emails and increase our workload b/c we've trained our users to think every email is a phish test from cybersecuriry.
I don’t see the problem, is that not the point of phishing tests? Users need to ensure the sender is legitimate before taking action such as clicking links.
good way to get me to ignore all emails
Yet another good idea in theory ruined by the human condition. Train people to think emails may be dangerous? Instead of critically examining each one they just ignore them to minimize risk by default. No amount of training will beat the cognative skills required for competent spam identification into most heads. Even if it could, some phising is so sophisticated in the social engineering it even tricks up cybersecurity types who should know better. Damned if you do, damned if you don't from a company perspective.
But the truth is emails may be dangerous, and the trainings exist to show people how to tell the difference. What reasonable alternative is there? Your argument is effectively “People will never learn how to use a fire extinguisher so why bother doing fire safety training. Some fires are so bad that a fire extinguisher will do nothing.” We don’t control the danger, but we can manage and minimize the risk through training.
What reasonable alternative is there?
Plain-text emails. No clickables, no tracker images.
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Honestly, while I agree that good training is a way forward, I gotta say the training at my workplace does NOT let you know how to check anything. It's more of a "don't open emails you don't trust", here are some nightmare scenarios. While, at the same time, we get actual mandatory training emails, that are flagged by both our internal mail system, and the pre-installed mail client as "DO NOT TRUST" that we are required to click through. My complaints to IT to at least fix the internal mail system flagging have been replied to with "User's should expect these emails, so they should know to ignore all the warnings and click anyway."
We are training people to ignore their training, so of course it's not helping.
Also, even with SPF and DMARC and whatever other TXT records in place, it's still possible to get a "spoofed" From address into a user's inbox, so I find teaching people to use that header as an indicator of anything personally offensive to my technical knowledge.
The cyber security emails in my company are so fucked up that everyone is paranoid to open up any email. Maybe it was fear. Or maybe it was collective malicious compliance. Or maybe we're all just sick of it.
A manager last week said nobody filled out a company intake form because they used a new survey software, so the url didn't look familiar.
The CFO emailed a PDF of a presentation and people were afraid to view it during meetings.
In the chat software, we are constantly going, "Is this real?"
Congrats security nerds.
Next up: All internal emails and files must be signed by the certificate that was issued to the employee sending it, if an email is send without a valid signature the E-Mail server self destructs to prevent infection.
Not to mention the fact that the majority of email clients these days don't even actually show you the full URL of the mail server that the mail is coming from. It gets obfuscated away over the display name and you have to explicitly go out of your way to actually see the full URL
This is so crazy to me. Why the hell did they start hiding the address? The one thing that can't be faked? Couldn't believe how hard it was the first time I needed to check.
I got a message saying I needed to sign up and completed a course I'd never heard of so I marked it as spam and deleted it.
Turned out it was genuine...
Last week I came in to work with an email that I received a $100 gift card. I immediately reported it as phishing and went about my day. A few hours later my manager asked if I received an email about said gift card and I told him I reported it. Turns out it was legit and was for good performance. Whoops
phish tests are redundant after a point. I flagged the first few but they upped the frequency so much it got ridiculous. Turns out the header for the phishing tests all contains the name of the testing company. New phish tests are re directed to my brownie points folder, so I just have to worry about the real thing now
I've worked more than one place that did constant phishing testing, and also corporate creatures would send out links to websites we've never used before that everyone was required to click, so the only way to tell whether this was in the "get fired for clicking" or the "get fired for not clicking" bucket was that phishing test header. They never understood why this was a problematic combination, and never stopped doing both.
“Here’s an offer for something we know you want and that a respectful employer would provide. Oh, you actually thought your employer respected you? You must be an idiot who needs special training.”
The thing is, there were some hints in the email it wasn't legit, like bad sender or weird links. That was the test. That the employer is bad too, doesn't change the fact the employee fell for the bait.
I feel that if your job requires you to drive, the company would provide the means of transportation. Heck, I work from home and I get to choose between either a company car with a card to fill it up whenever or a pretty roomy budget with a train card.
The only phishing e-mails I receive are from my employer. As a matter of process I report these e-mails like a diligent lackey, then upon receiving an e-mail congratulating me on passing their test, I report that one too. I think the non-test phishing reports undergo manual review so I hope I'm wasting someone's time somewhere in payback.
Still haven't forgiven them for a tone-deaf 'we care about you during COVID' phishing e-mail they sent when everyone was genuinely struggling.
Neat thing I learned at a past company. The phishing emails had links (the ones you aren't supposed to click on) that either contained the email address of the person getting tested, or it pulled it somehow. It was really easy to figure out where that information needed to go in the URL. This is how tracking "failures" was tested and reported. I would just put in the email address of people from the opsec team into that url, copy it, and paste it into one of those global website testers that checked if a site was available from different countries around the world (I'm assuming using some kind of VPN).
Theoretically it should have given these people failures in their own tests, and also come from all sorts of weird locations globally.
Not sure if it actually did, but I like to think I wasted at least some of their time.
Never got in trouble for it so who knows.
You might have a lot of phishing emails that the company filters out without you ever seeing them. For these tests, they do things to make sure this email will get through, even if the automated filters would have otherwise blocked it.
That's a good point; my company actually does implement something like this, though it invites intervention from the recipient for confirmation. I have previously received e-mail notifications stating that an e-mail has been 'held' as being suspicious and provided me an option to 'release' the e-mail (in these cases the e-mails were genuine and known in advance to me).
Of course, I have no simple way to determine if there is also an additional hard filter that blocks out obvious phishing with no notification to the end user.
There are likely two things going on.
One is a hard block for phishing, ones you will never see, never be alerted of, and never be told about unless you go digging for a missing email you know should have come through.
The other is a soft block for spam. You will likely get an email about the spam being quarantined with the option to release the spam into your inbox.
If the phishing emails were shown as quarantined, you’d end up with hundreds of quarantined emails a day for anyone with a public facing name. Our CFO for instance gets the most out of anyone in the company, numbering in the thousands.
I got a list of domains used by the phish testing company, and passed them around my department.
Same here, and I got annoyed at these emails filtering through the different rules that I have set up. I realized that the test emails all had some values in the headers to indicate them as such, so I set up a rule to filter them out to a separate folder. It obviously defeats the point, but it's much less annoying.
I report any and all emails from anyone on the CSIRT team as suspicious.
They did a phising test targeting every employee without informing me (internal ITSM lead) first. So they deserve the extra work, and my entire team does the same.
Companies will do that and then send links with url shorteners for totally legit things and wonder why everyone ignores then.
My company has to send out emails like: "The mandatory training email is not phishing, even though it is flagged [EXTERNAL] by the system."
Me: "That's what a fishing email would say."
We must be coworkers. They literally did this to our group yesterday for an external survey. And I refuse to fill it out.
All emails get automatically forwarded to the IT department, for "suspected phishing". If it is from a known internal source, especially so.
Sounds like phishing tests are just the company outsourcing spam filtering to their own employees instead of paying for a spam filtering service of their own.
I just don't open emails from my company unless the subject has the words Urgent or Action Required and even those I forward to the IT anti phishing email to annoy them, even when I know it's legit.
Now all you get is emails which say urgent, so you don't know which are actually urgent.
So far I've always installed a filter (at work, school, and privately) that removes the "high priority" flag from any mail.
If it can't wait, call me.
Sounds about right.
Pro tip, set up a rule in your email client to send any email that contains the following phrases, phishme.com or knowb4, in the header to junk.
Note that I said header, not From field.
It is so stupid that orgs spend thousands of dollars on these products and you can be seen as not being a phishing risk because of their shitty systems.
I'm a software developer. A few years ago, we were all sent mail by a sketchy looking company that had our company's logo slapped onto the header in the sloppiest way possible and wanted us to click on a link to a "mandatory Cybersecurity training".
Obviously everyone ignored it. Which is exactly what you'd want people to do. Turns out, it was real and not a scam, just incompetence.
i think you all completed the training before it started
At my work, we got a phishing email a few weeks before Christmas.
It was for a gift card for a Honey Baked ham.
I was pretty sure it was a phishing test but apparently a lot of people fell for it. Enough so, that a fairly senior colleague blasted an email saying it was in poor taste since it was Christmas and a lot of people could really use it.
I thought that made it more effective training because a scammer would use that, but I also understand that it has the potential to fuck with people's emotions.
Anyway, that started a trend within the company's Teams and social platform, making jokes and sharing memes.
The CEO even emailed, agreeing with the original email blast and then had a real giveaway of honey baked gift cards.
My company sent one of these out made to look like a survey on employee thoughts and opinions on their compensation - a very real issue in our company that I suspect they just wanted to try and condition people not to talk about.
Replied back to let them know as such and to inform them it was an asshole move and I would not be completing their training. Was worth the HR write-up - fuck those suits, too.