My current company makes it real easy. All their simulated phishing addresses use the fictitious TLD of “.corn” so I just setup an email rule to filter them.
That’s a crack it open with a hex editor, find who sent it, delete then return a note to the sender letting them know you’ve removed the problematic communication, thankyouverymuch… signed ABiggerCuntThanYou@WhyIsMyCompanyWastingMoneyOnThisShit.org
Clearly he’s trying to trick you into pressing the “Report Phishing” button, which must be some sort of a trap. I’d check the attached document for further clues, especially since he’s telling me not to. Must be something interesting there
in the Deleted Items folder. “Delete” just moves the email there. At my company anything older than a month in Deleted Items gets actually deleted. But more importantly if you just delete it, maybe nobody knows it’s’ there. If you report it the outlook team can delete it from the servers.
I know this is a leap, but for some reason reading this made me want to buy a domain like virus.porn and make it the most wholesome, lemmy community on the planet.
Or girlsof in stagam, which apparently has disappeared but used to be the story of the adventures of a person called Girlsof in the magical realm of Stagram.
A company I was in a few jobs back had several layers of IT department, there was the local studio department that handled our everyday stuff and a “head office” somewhere far away that set policy and handed out budget and whatnot.
One day “head office” IT decided it was a good idea to send out some fake phishing emails to “test” us. They didn’t tell the local IT department about it, I guess they were also being “tested”. My manager received one and only recognized it as a phishing attempt after he’d clicked just one too many things for it to feel safe to ignore. So he yanked the power on his computer and contacted the local IT department, as is protocol when something potentially dangerous just happened.
The local network went into lockdown while local IT tried to figure out if something actually dangerous had happened. It cost the studio as a whole several hours of work time, which for a studio our size translated to an obscene dollar cost. Nobody on our side of things did anything wrong, even that one extra “dangerous” click my manager did wasn’t something he could be blamed for - head office had crafted the fake phishing attempt well and his reaction to it would have prevented damage had it been real.
Phishing attempts that got far enough to actually show up in our internal corporate inboxes like that aren’t common, though. They’re normally blocked by the layers of firewalls and whatnot. We almost never saw email on those accounts from outside the organization itself, period.
And once you’ve run something capable of remote execution on a machine that’s inside the local network, with the sort of privileges that his machine had (he wasn’t just a bureaucratic sort of manager, he was writing code too), you don’t want to mess around.
My company sends at least one fake phishing email a week. They track stats for them on a security page and I wear it as a badge of honor that my report says 100% viewed and 0% reported.
My company makes you take a course of you fail one or if you ignore 4 or 5 so I have the highest reporting record of the company just because of how much I hate that course
I think they do that at my company too but in addition to not reporting phishing emails I have a personal rule that I don’t do any “mandatory” training unless someone in my management chain specifically asks me to. My boss probably gets annoyed by that occasionally but you’d be surprised how much of that stuff I never get asked about.
Yeah that’s a good call. I don’t push back when asked directly I just pretend I didn’t see the emails. Most of the time it’s fine but the boring security stuff is usually the one they get me on.
They need to up their game to cover internationalized homograph vulnerabilities, using roughly similar characters from different international alphabets to create totally different domain names:
I do have a tendency to check where the link leads before clicking on it, so the difference between those two is quite obvious to me: http://example.com/ vs http://xn--exmple-4nf.com/, but a lot of people probably do not do that.
When they first started doing these tests unannounced, our IT department got a horrendous failure rate and then management had to announce that if we recognize it as a phishing simulation, we should still report it, and we also shouldn’t start poking around in the supposed phishing links. 😅
I have over 8000 unread mails in my inbox. Whoever contacts me used Slack. I don’t give a fuck about emails unless DMs me “hey can you maybe answer that customer mail I forwarded you?”
So I would have a fabulous time with such a stupid policy.
Mine includes a header so their mail filter knows to ignore it.
At this point, I’m pretty sure that every employee who has been there for more than a month has written or at least copied a filter to delete any email with that header.
I’ve never been comfortable with that kind of mass deletion and we have, AFAIK, unlimited mailbox storage, so I just set my version to mark those emails as read.
At a previous job, there was a header. I can’t remember it directly, but lets say it was like this:
X-Acme-Security-Test: Authorized simulated phishing exercise conducted by KnowBe4 on behalf of Acme Corp for security awareness training and compliance validation
Apparently KnowBe4 lets customers set their own custom headers. So this was probably set by my company. And not something everyone will see.
But also, they set an X-PHISHTEST header. Maybe its a signed header, so they can cryptographically prove the test was in accordance with the customer’s request (this email was sent by us, but it uses YOUR private key, so clearly you were involved here, and we arent just scamming people, or otherwise allows you to validate it at the firewall/spam filter). This isn’t the header I remember, but apparentlly can also be used to detect them – the explicitly say not to do that, but here we are.
But if you ever get a knowbe4 phishing test, check the email headers. you’ll probably find something to key off of.
Also there’s a “congratulations you’re a good boy” popup when you click the report phishing button in outlook, so I guess those headers is how the plugin determines whether this is a test email.
My place has this thing where most phishing test emails are obvious but every once in a while they’ll drop a really good one, sometimes these even pose as our managers.
The company I work for has lots of training to recognize phishing attempts, and then they proceed to send emails that tick most of the “avoid this” boxes.
I just take it one step farther and never open any email. If it’s important you will CC my manager and he will physically come by my office and tell me about the email, giving me multi-factor phishing protection. If he demands I open an email then I am absolved of responsibility.
My current company makes it real easy. All their simulated phishing addresses use the fictitious TLD of “.corn” so I just setup an email rule to filter them.
So what do you do when you get an actual phishing mail that doesn’t use that TLD?
An actual email sent by my company. (not representative of their usual)
That’s a crack it open with a hex editor, find who sent it, delete then return a note to the sender letting them know you’ve removed the problematic communication, thankyouverymuch… signed ABiggerCuntThanYou@WhyIsMyCompanyWastingMoneyOnThisShit.org
Yeah if anyone falls for this lock them out of their computer immediately.
Clearly he’s trying to trick you into pressing the “Report Phishing” button, which must be some sort of a trap. I’d check the attached document for further clues, especially since he’s telling me not to. Must be something interesting there
…if you delete it, it’ll sit in your inbox? I…what?
in the Deleted Items folder. “Delete” just moves the email there. At my company anything older than a month in Deleted Items gets actually deleted. But more importantly if you just delete it, maybe nobody knows it’s’ there. If you report it the outlook team can delete it from the servers.
I suppose it means to say that it gets moved to trash and sits there.
I know this is a leap, but for some reason reading this made me want to buy a domain like virus.porn and make it the most wholesome, lemmy community on the planet.
Oh, you mean like penisland.net?
Or girlsof in stagam, which apparently has disappeared but used to be the story of the adventures of a person called Girlsof in the magical realm of Stagram.
I remember that one too, but think it was actually called Slütsof In Stagrâm
ass.golf
Be the change you want to see! I’ll sign up straight away.
P1nkman, please report to the training room.
But there’s nothing here 😭
This reminded me of notpron.com
Anything but wholesome though…
Why not?
A company I was in a few jobs back had several layers of IT department, there was the local studio department that handled our everyday stuff and a “head office” somewhere far away that set policy and handed out budget and whatnot.
One day “head office” IT decided it was a good idea to send out some fake phishing emails to “test” us. They didn’t tell the local IT department about it, I guess they were also being “tested”. My manager received one and only recognized it as a phishing attempt after he’d clicked just one too many things for it to feel safe to ignore. So he yanked the power on his computer and contacted the local IT department, as is protocol when something potentially dangerous just happened.
The local network went into lockdown while local IT tried to figure out if something actually dangerous had happened. It cost the studio as a whole several hours of work time, which for a studio our size translated to an obscene dollar cost. Nobody on our side of things did anything wrong, even that one extra “dangerous” click my manager did wasn’t something he could be blamed for - head office had crafted the fake phishing attempt well and his reaction to it would have prevented damage had it been real.
Head office never tried a stunt like that again.
Given how common phishing attempts can be though, shutting down for every single one seems like overkill.
Phishing attempts that got far enough to actually show up in our internal corporate inboxes like that aren’t common, though. They’re normally blocked by the layers of firewalls and whatnot. We almost never saw email on those accounts from outside the organization itself, period.
And once you’ve run something capable of remote execution on a machine that’s inside the local network, with the sort of privileges that his machine had (he wasn’t just a bureaucratic sort of manager, he was writing code too), you don’t want to mess around.
All I could think as I read this was Dwight’s fire drill from the office
I’ve also never fallen for any of the phising emails the IT department sends to test me, my secret is almost never checking my email
My company sends at least one fake phishing email a week. They track stats for them on a security page and I wear it as a badge of honor that my report says 100% viewed and 0% reported.
My company makes you take a course of you fail one or if you ignore 4 or 5 so I have the highest reporting record of the company just because of how much I hate that course
I think they do that at my company too but in addition to not reporting phishing emails I have a personal rule that I don’t do any “mandatory” training unless someone in my management chain specifically asks me to. My boss probably gets annoyed by that occasionally but you’d be surprised how much of that stuff I never get asked about.
Last year our CISO personally reached out to me and asked me to do the course that’s overdue. I was a little nervous for a second and decided to obey.
Yeah that’s a good call. I don’t push back when asked directly I just pretend I didn’t see the emails. Most of the time it’s fine but the boring security stuff is usually the one they get me on.
My guess? Their bonus was tied to 100% compliance and you were one of the last people to do the training.
Nice. My company ties the bonus payment to completing all the mandatory training. You get many reminders from HR when the bonus payment is approaching
My company is using phishing simulations from a company that puts their company name in the x headers or every email, so that’s also easy filter.
As a bonus, that filter also throws all the full security training courses to junk
Kemming is 100 level preparedness.
They need to up their game to cover internationalized homograph vulnerabilities, using roughly similar characters from different international alphabets to create totally different domain names:
example.com
exаmple.com
They look identical but are entirely different.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IDN_homograph_attack
They "a"s don’t look identical at all with a good font like Atkinson Hyperlegible Next, which also very clearly differentiates between
etc…
Well that’s just rude
I do have a tendency to check where the link leads before clicking on it, so the difference between those two is quite obvious to me:
http://example.com/vshttp://xn--exmple-4nf.com/, but a lot of people probably do not do that.I would definitely not click on the second one.
If we don’t report the emails as phishing it is considered a fail.
I report so many things from executive level because all of the training examples use exec comms as an example.
…and then you don’t get into company Harvard, or what?
I’ll delete the failure report without reading that either.
When they first started doing these tests unannounced, our IT department got a horrendous failure rate and then management had to announce that if we recognize it as a phishing simulation, we should still report it, and we also shouldn’t start poking around in the supposed phishing links. 😅
lucky you. they fail us if we don’t right click report phishing.
Can still set up a header-matching rule - just need to mark the email with a label, so you can report it without even having to read it.
I have over 8000 unread mails in my inbox. Whoever contacts me used Slack. I don’t give a fuck about emails unless DMs me “hey can you maybe answer that customer mail I forwarded you?”
So I would have a fabulous time with such a stupid policy.
Mine includes a header so their mail filter knows to ignore it.
At this point, I’m pretty sure that every employee who has been there for more than a month has written or at least copied a filter to delete any email with that header.
I’ve never been comfortable with that kind of mass deletion and we have, AFAIK, unlimited mailbox storage, so I just set my version to mark those emails as read.
edit: Mail, not mark.
If your company contracts with phish.me then that URL is actually in the email header metadata.
Just set up a rule for the word phish to a special folder, and then you can use the “report” button on everything in that folder to get the credit.
So what do you do when you get an actual phishing mail that doesn’t use that word?
KnowBe4 includes a bunch of headers in the email, including a disclosure saying they have permission to run the simulated phishing test.
I heard a rumour that KnowBe4 have ties to Scientology.
From what some Googling told me, Kevin Mitnick is a scientologist, as is most of the upper management .
Not really relevant here, just interesting…
Tell me more…
Apparently I’m both right and wrong.
At a previous job, there was a header. I can’t remember it directly, but lets say it was like this:
X-Acme-Security-Test: Authorized simulated phishing exercise conducted by KnowBe4 on behalf of Acme Corp for security awareness training and compliance validationApparently KnowBe4 lets customers set their own custom headers. So this was probably set by my company. And not something everyone will see.
But also, they set an
X-PHISHTESTheader. Maybe its a signed header, so they can cryptographically prove the test was in accordance with the customer’s request (this email was sent by us, but it uses YOUR private key, so clearly you were involved here, and we arent just scamming people, or otherwise allows you to validate it at the firewall/spam filter). This isn’t the header I remember, but apparentlly can also be used to detect them – the explicitly say not to do that, but here we are.But if you ever get a knowbe4 phishing test, check the email headers. you’ll probably find something to key off of.
Also there’s a “congratulations you’re a good boy” popup when you click the report phishing button in outlook, so I guess those headers is how the plugin determines whether this is a test email.
My place has this thing where most phishing test emails are obvious but every once in a while they’ll drop a really good one, sometimes these even pose as our managers.
The company I work for has lots of training to recognize phishing attempts, and then they proceed to send emails that tick most of the “avoid this” boxes.
I just take it one step farther and never open any email. If it’s important you will CC my manager and he will physically come by my office and tell me about the email, giving me multi-factor phishing protection. If he demands I open an email then I am absolved of responsibility.
Lmfao, .corn sounds like an instance someone would spin up to compete with lemmy.beans