My company started with mandatory cybersecurity trainings for all employees. The training tool sends out automated emails to remind you when you have to do a new part of the training.
These emails, from a cybersecurity course, followed all the rules of being a phishing email:
Sent from a non-company server
Had a big red button to click here
Urged you to take action (“You have 5 days to complete your training”)
IT decided to fix that, by adding a line to the emails that this email is really from our company. Like a phisher wouldn’t think of saying “nah, trust me bro, I’m totally legit”
That’s what always kills me… the line of “this is not a phishing email” as if just anyone can’t add that. If anything that line makes me more suspicious.
I blocked these emails for years for this reason. We actually do get real phishing attempts about once every other month when a client gets compromised. Makes everyone at our company very vigilant.
Management got pissed when I hadn’t done any of them. Apparently, the emails in english/spanish/french with “click me” links were legit, lol. I set up extensive rules and blocklists for a reason. Pretty sure it’s for SOC2 compliance or something.
My company sends out these kids of phishing scam test emails too. They were actually pretty decently faked. But, they use the same identifying string in the header of each and every one, so I made an outlook rule to quarantine them In a particular folder so that I could correctly report all of them. Occasionally I report the weird legitimate email surveys we get from HR too and mass emails from IT with bad spelling, just so they don’t get suspicious of my perfect record.
Yeah you’d think a company could forward from their own domain or something, but I get a ton of legit emails from non company domains because I guess they’re to lazy/too much effort? Anyway, I just try not to click any email links.
A better way would be to have the link be to the company’s webserver which could then redirect to the external course.
I offered to set this up for my company (it’s not that hard) but nah, they went with telling everyone to click on a link to an unfamiliar site to learn about why they shouldn’t click on links to unfamiliar sites.
Then you are still trusting people to hover the link before clicking which from what I’ve seen isn’t the best. Though there is the added benefit of using this as additional training to hover…
My company unfortunately uses Microsoft 365 and when they started setting that up, I got an e-mail from a microsoftonline.com domain, which asked me to enter my username and password.
I reported that mail immediately as phishing. Like, it used the ol’ confusing domain trick and everything, it’s gotta be phishing.
Turns out, nope, Microsoft legitimately operates that domain and uses it for account notifications of all things. Great job, guys.
We had something like this too. The header had our company’s logo as just a rectangular white picture. It looked like someone just copy/pasted the first result on Google images.
The emails were mass reported, up to the point there was an internal message sent around to stop reporting them because they are legitimate. Of course, no action was taken to make them look less suspicious.
If I’d ever want to phish someone at my company, I’d know exactly what to do. Make the email look exactly like the training ones.
My company started with mandatory cybersecurity trainings for all employees. The training tool sends out automated emails to remind you when you have to do a new part of the training.
These emails, from a cybersecurity course, followed all the rules of being a phishing email:
IT decided to fix that, by adding a line to the emails that this email is really from our company. Like a phisher wouldn’t think of saying “nah, trust me bro, I’m totally legit”
That’s what always kills me… the line of “this is not a phishing email” as if just anyone can’t add that. If anything that line makes me more suspicious.
They could send an email from a legit company email stating “mail XXX will send you some legit emails in a week or so, do them.”
That’s what my company finally did, it works out a LOT better for everyone.
I blocked these emails for years for this reason. We actually do get real phishing attempts about once every other month when a client gets compromised. Makes everyone at our company very vigilant.
Management got pissed when I hadn’t done any of them. Apparently, the emails in english/spanish/french with “click me” links were legit, lol. I set up extensive rules and blocklists for a reason. Pretty sure it’s for SOC2 compliance or something.
My company sends out these kids of phishing scam test emails too. They were actually pretty decently faked. But, they use the same identifying string in the header of each and every one, so I made an outlook rule to quarantine them In a particular folder so that I could correctly report all of them. Occasionally I report the weird legitimate email surveys we get from HR too and mass emails from IT with bad spelling, just so they don’t get suspicious of my perfect record.
Had this at a previous company. Why didn’t they just use their regula URL instead of “(company)university.com” I don’t know. Reported as fishing
Yeah you’d think a company could forward from their own domain or something, but I get a ton of legit emails from non company domains because I guess they’re to lazy/too much effort? Anyway, I just try not to click any email links.
The correct solution to this is to have the training emails say to log in to take the training, no link in the email at all
A better way would be to have the link be to the company’s webserver which could then redirect to the external course.
I offered to set this up for my company (it’s not that hard) but nah, they went with telling everyone to click on a link to an unfamiliar site to learn about why they shouldn’t click on links to unfamiliar sites.
Then you are still trusting people to hover the link before clicking which from what I’ve seen isn’t the best. Though there is the added benefit of using this as additional training to hover…
My company unfortunately uses Microsoft 365 and when they started setting that up, I got an e-mail from a
microsoftonline.comdomain, which asked me to enter my username and password.I reported that mail immediately as phishing. Like, it used the ol’ confusing domain trick and everything, it’s gotta be phishing.
Turns out, nope, Microsoft legitimately operates that domain and uses it for account notifications of all things. Great job, guys.
We had something like this too. The header had our company’s logo as just a rectangular white picture. It looked like someone just copy/pasted the first result on Google images.
Then both the csec course failed to educate the employees, because a responsible trained employee would report or ignore those mails lol
The emails were mass reported, up to the point there was an internal message sent around to stop reporting them because they are legitimate. Of course, no action was taken to make them look less suspicious.
If I’d ever want to phish someone at my company, I’d know exactly what to do. Make the email look exactly like the training ones.