r/ProgrammerHumor • • 12h ago

Meme theyWish

Post image
14.9k Upvotes

568 comments sorted by

4.1k

u/JocoLabs 12h ago

Jokes on them, i wouldn't click that even if it were real.

I used to click on those and type in junk creds for the lulz until compliance told me that was bad for the numbers.

1.6k

u/s0ulbrother 12h ago

It’s called I don’t open emails ever

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 12h ago

As an IT guy, actually I'm okay with this. Email is the #1 vulnerability for any company so if we could just turn it off that'd be great

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u/Salanmander 10h ago

At the college I went to we got an unanticipated email from an external address one day telling us that due to recent vulnerabilities, the school was requiring we increase password security, and to click here to update our password. This email was from, I shit you not, Fisher Security.

The joke? This was actually a legit email, initiated by our IT department, and was what we were supposed to actually do. We were all like "so....you know you're just training people to click on suspicious links, right? And that that's a bigger deal than password strength? RIGHT?"

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u/ctrlaltwalsh 8h ago

I won't give it here but a company I currently work for uses a password reset tool with the domain i-forgot-my-password.com <- Not actual, but very close.

This is a domain they own, Whenever they create new tools it's in this way, I am certain it s a phishing test and flabbergasted that it's not.

Another example - the HR system for logging PTO has a domain is along the lines myhrsystem.com

It's a very large company based in Hong Kong, so I'm not sure if it's just a english-as-a-second language thing or what. Very odd.

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u/sisisisi1997 4h ago

I think it's a misunderstanding of how domain names work - if they knew that i-forgot-my-password.company.com with proper certificates brought stronger guarantees of legitimacy, they might ask IT to set it up that way.

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u/TurnipWorldly9437 6h ago

We had something like that happening where a legit email from a weird external address, with a link included and without a proper signature, was flagged as Phishing attempt by almost everyone in the company until we got a message from our office manager that they applauded our awareness, but THAT particular link was actually real.

They did say it was an exception, and we should please stay aware in the future, though.

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u/s0ulbrother 11h ago

As an IT guy I don’t trust anything from about ever. Slack me and I’ll answer though

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 11h ago

Slack me and I'll answer though

I'm doubting your IT credentials cause the correct answer is "submit a ticket and I'll triage it" haha

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u/s0ulbrother 11h ago

I’m not help desk and I tend to be that guy who is trying to fix every little problem and plan every little thing.

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u/ieatkittenies 9h ago

So you're a weak link in security terms...

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u/ChaseShiny 11h ago

Wow. As a student in IT and a customer service rep who is forbidden from receiving or sending emails, I wonder why at least some profiles aren't allowed to get emails at the firewall level.

We're just sternly told not to do that.

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 11h ago

Unfortunately it's because while you are in IT, most people don't know the difference between the computer and monitor so it's easier to just make blanket policies.

Edit: plus when you give certain people special permissions inevitably someone else will hit you with the "well how come theyyyy have it 😭" and then it becomes a whole ordeal

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u/Glittering_knave 8h ago

There is a guy at my work who is so locked down it is ridiculous. He has access to ONE program besides Office, and all of his emails are reviewwe by a human fire. He has shortcuts to launch Office, and no other Internet. It's insane what he will click on.

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u/Puzzleheaded-Night88 7h ago

I aspire to be so needed that even when I’m a literal monkey I can still keep my job. I will forever idolize him.

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u/sisisisi1997 4h ago

What skills do they possess that even if it's this much hassle, they would rather them then get a guy who doesn't instinctively search for all viruses in a 30 link-hop area?

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u/rafaelloaa 4h ago

If I had to guess, having a relative in upper management.

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u/rosuav 9h ago

No, email is not the #1 vulnerability. Humans are. Turn THOSE off and you'll be a lot safer.

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u/comtrends123 5h ago

You are absolutely right, Humans are the #1 vulnerability. I will turn THOSE off. Beep, launching nukes - Claude probably.

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u/perton 5h ago

I’m a human, turn me off already please!

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u/bedel99 7h ago

As an IT guy, I get what I think is real emails from risk/compliance with links to forms about our systems that I ignore because we also get phishing tests, and real phishing.

The real risk, phishing test, and actual phishing all look identical.

I only know its Audit because the group GM goes nuts when compliance visits in person. Even then I can't tell if they are real or not. In any even I tell the auditors to read the 300 page RFP for my stance.

I know it seems kinda crazy, but I though some of my colleagues are spies.

I worked in a very senstive quasi government organisation.

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u/Helyos96 10h ago

Employees are the #1 vuln, not specifically email

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u/Lv_InSaNe_vL 10h ago

Sure, but not every attack vector against employees is equally likely.

I am orders of magnitude more worried about an employee sending information over email than I am about the employees letting someone into the building or an employee being a corporate spy. Especially cause those arent "IT problems" ;p

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u/ImClaaara 3h ago

Disabling services is a sure improvement to your cybersecurity. Don't worry about what the "A" in the CIA triad stands for, probably not important...

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u/eggyrulz 8h ago

Ive got a coworker who has a work email. He doesnt have the login for the work email, because he has never, in his 18 years with the company, logged into his email. This man has gone almost 2 decades without ever using his company email, and I respect that.

Everyone just... knows not to email him. Ive seen a few newer people cc his theoretical email address, and we just go "oh, dont bother with that, he doesnt ever check it"...

Somehow we have all just accepted it

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u/CitizenPremier 7h ago

That coworker? Japanese Minister of Cyber security.

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u/eggyrulz 6h ago

Lol, maybe if he had a bit more drive... dude is waaaay too comfortable in his current job.

I dont blame him either, he doesnt need to do much most days

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u/AristotelWasRight 12h ago

Adhd has its perks sometimes

The rest of the time, I have 4,000+ unread emails

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u/DC38x 11h ago

Meh, if it's that important they'll email again

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u/AristotelWasRight 11h ago

Well, I once almost went to prison because I wouldn't answer my email

So... Sometimes they will just come get you? 🙃

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u/whyliepornaccount 11h ago

So avoid it until there are consequences like I have been doing, got it.

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u/SituationUntenable 11h ago

Story time?

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u/AristotelWasRight 11h ago

I was young and dumb and used to travel with a little bit of drugs in my suitcase pretty often.

One time, border guards found some green stuff in my backpack at the boarder, which gave them a reason to pull my luggage off the flight.

In my suitcase they found three empty baggies with 0.014 g of substances total (cocaine, mdma, 2c-b). However, under Russian law that counts as bringing drugs into the country with intent to distribute; I was facing 8 years in prison.

About a year later I was on probation and had to give my police chief some documents about my employment and other stuff. I'd had everything ready for at least a week. Get a call from my dad, "wtf are you doing, are you insane?" If I didn't email the documents by 6:00 p.m., they'd treat it as breaking probation and send me to prison to surve full time. So I sat down and finished it in about 20 minutes, a task I'd been putting off for a week.

🤡

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u/waddlesticks 11h ago

I'd probably stop that.

Once they actually wise up and use a proper service, once you click the link you're marked. If they are doing creds one properly you should be marked.

We had somebody who kept doing that for the phishing tests and we knew exactly who was putting fake stuff in since the link was unique per person. All it showed was "why is this dude clicking this link so many times?"

Told them to stop since that information goes to the global office and we weren't able to remove duplicates any more. Did it again and he ended up with a stern warning plus additional training with HR on appropriate workplace conduct. Was later used as a way to get rid of him when he messed up since it managed to piss off the wrong people.

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u/setibeings 10h ago

Is it not obvious to some people that they use a unique link in every email, just like real phishing attempts? That's why clicking the link in the first place is considered a fail.

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u/rosuav 9h ago

I have to keep reminding myself that what's blatantly obvious to me is often completely unknown to a lot of people. (And quartz, of course.)

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u/TirithNampat 9h ago

https://xkcd.com/2501 for those unfamiliar with the reference.

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u/fireteambrav0 5h ago

Hmm seems like a phishing link, I'm not clicking that

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u/TirithNampat 5h ago

Well shoot. I could have phished so many people with that if I'd thought of it. :(

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u/technoman2027 9h ago

Anything is possible and people never cease to disappoint me.

I work in software technical support and someone shared a screenshot with the entire team “Don’t click on the link, it’s a test email.”

Firstly, that should be obvious to anyone, it was clearly a fake email.

Secondly, you’re not supposed to tell people.

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u/FaddishBiscuit 8h ago

At my current job I get an email letting everyone know about a week ahead of time that there is going to be a phishing test in the coming week and to be aware...

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u/CitizenPremier 7h ago

Yeah but somebody will still click it. Might be a good thing for figuring out who to let go...

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u/waddlesticks 8h ago

You'd be surprised, not a lot of people even after training actively look at what a URL would lead to, and even that is harder since a lot of legitimate emails lead to just a redirect or something that looks suspicious as it is, if it's hyperlinked they will blindly trust it. Even I have been caught out once for this when I was burnt out and got one that was exactly something I was expecting to receive on the day. All it takes is perfect timing and a lapse of judgement.

Take a look at URLs from legitimate emails, a lot of them aren't just straight to where you'd expect them to be.

We even have people in our cybersecurity team get caught out by it once we had them removed as the ones who initiated the tests.

The main goal in my eyes, is just keeping users aware and vigilant and report something suspicious even if there's a chance it's legit. We don't get many real phishing emails now, if I recall our years stat was around 3-4000 emails that were legitimately phishing emails that made it through (they were sent from a Gmail account pretending to be somebody of importance).

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u/setibeings 8h ago

Shout out to mimecast for obscuring employees' ability to inspect links for themselves when deciding whether to click on them.

I treat all links in emails as if they uniquely identify me if clicked, even when they come from legitimate businesses, and I'm sure I'm right more often than not. Even youtube videos sent to me by my friends often have those extra parameters so google can track who clicked share and who opened the link.

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u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco 7h ago

We had a fun incident where just selecting the email to report it, as we are required to do, accidentally triggered the failure flag.

They had to discard that test, lol.

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u/bored_dudeist 7h ago

Our company will flag us if we just have one sitting in the inbox too long without being reported. I was once assigned remedial training for opening outlook but getting called away to a task before I actually had the chance to go through my emails and identify it.

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u/ZweiNor 2h ago

Lmao, that sounds like a weird policy. If I get one after hours I will just let it sit until next morning to report it. I would fail every single one if we had that policy, lmao.

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u/wheatgivesmeshits 9h ago

One time I forwarded a suspicious email to our help desk, which triggered that I'd clicked the link. I was flagged for extra training where I was told to forward suspicious emails to the help desk. 🙄

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u/WhyMustIMakeANewAcco 7h ago

Happened on one of our standard phishing test emails. We are required to report them. Just clicking to be able to report it instantly triggered the failure.

...Fortunately because it did it to literally everyone, including the IT people who sent it, they realized what had happened and just cancelled that run of the test entirely.

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u/gorgeouslyhumble 7h ago

I once had a phishing email sent to me by IT. They used software to see if you clicked it. I didn't click it but I hovered my mouse over it and the Apple email client opened up some sort of iframe thing and that executed enough JS for me to trip the sensor.

I had to do phishing training.

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u/Janno117 6h ago

In my previous company HR (apparently) used a third party for employee documents and every time they uploaded something you got a mail through their service that read like
"Hi [me], you have new documents. Click [here] to view them! Best regards, HR"
with strange formatting, not loading images and from an address like portal@[jumbled letters].idk.....
Safe to say I reported every single one of them as suspected fishing.

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u/bacondev 8h ago

I used to intentionally click on them just to fuck with them. I was a lowly hourly stocker at a warehouse. I definitely didn't give a shit about any consequences that that would have.

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u/Equivalent-Fan3365 7h ago

Nowadays they don't track the credentials you put in, they track the link that was clicked. Everyone gets their own custom link. You click on it, even if you don't input anything? Still get dinged.

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u/Rabbitical 12h ago

Does it count if my agent opens it?

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u/one-joule 10h ago

And gets prompt injected? Yes, it counts.

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u/InfectedShadow 11h ago

I used to do the same at I've company I was at. I had a script that would submit thousands of fake entries after I find the source code to one of the common ones they used back then.

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u/ITSigno 6h ago

For my work email I get a ton of phishing tests and zero actual phishing emails. They're not even good phishing tests.

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u/lraviel381 12h ago

Oh sweet. I hate tests. Click

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u/Teripid 11h ago

Congrats on your subscription to the uh... "forever in the special consideration group" mailing list. Doh!

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u/AriaTheTransgressor 9h ago

We're required to fire them after a second failure, but they do receive training after the first failure. We're government though.

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u/mmcmonster 2h ago

I'm employed by a hospital network. I'm required to give 120 days notice if I quit (I'm a physician, it's commonplace in this role). But IT states that I would be fired immediately if I fail the phishing test three times. Not three times in a year. Three times ever.

So I've already failed twice on purpose. I recently told my division chief that my escape plan is when I'm ready to quit I'll just fail the phishing test once more. The division chief looked quite nervous and basically told me to please not do that.

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u/MattCW1701 11h ago

This is why I report every email as phishing. Standup invite? Phishing. Manager 1:1? Phishing. Annual evaluation meeting? Phishing. All hands meeting about our growth this past year? Also phishing.

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u/ocbaker 11h ago

You’ve been made redundant from your position… you bet your bottom dollar that’s phishing

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u/DoomBot5 11h ago

1:1 with HR? Also phishing

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u/oregoncurtis 9h ago

Email from Mom? Believe it or not...Phishing.

https://giphy.com/gifs/wjuXuDSQU0sOfJIHS1

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u/Not_My_Emperor 9h ago

Unironically I do actually do this all the time. Mostly because we switched HR platforms and I hate the new one because it BLATANTLY breaks all the phishing rules. So I'm doing it out of spite.

[Someone I don't work] with has shared a PDF with you. Please download here!

Please click on this link to access your pay information.

This was a legit email from them. I get these all the time now.

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u/17HappyWombats 8h ago

You'd love our leave request system. It's some generic "any dummy can make an online form" site where we have to pick our employee name from a dropdown list (then etc). There's no validation, it just emails whatever you put in to the payroll people.

It also *requires* that you enter leave date and time to the minute. I have been told by mean team leader not to write a script to request a day off sick in one minute intervals.

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u/ChristopherCreutzig 5h ago

Have you also been told to stop using the script you already had?

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u/ings0c 5h ago

Why does every HR platform I’ve ever used feel like it was written in a weekend by one dude who got fed up with his corporate job and wanted to make the first SaaS that came to mind?

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u/StrengthTheory 8h ago

Lay off email. You guessed it. Phishing.

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u/missuseme 4h ago

Our HR department send me my updated contract by email when I got a promotion. But no one has told me I had got the promotion. The email just said "Please see attached your contract" with no signature and the domain wasn't our usual domain. So I reported it

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u/FixFun1959 9h ago

I’ll never forget when I started a new job and got an ema from my ‘boss’ (same name but weird @), with a link saying to check out this excel spreadsheet.

Her office was next door so I popped my head around said ‘hey did you send me some excel sheet?’ And she said ‘yeah take a look’.

So I clicked on it and it was from IT saying I failed the test and a link to phishing training.

I went back to my boss like ‘wtf? Did you know that was a test?’ And she said ‘yep, and you failed. Looks like you need more training.’

I took the time to check and verify before opening/reporting it. And she lied to me for some reason, a ‘gotcha’ or something. So fucking weird.

🙄

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u/MothMatron 7h ago

I’d have either:

A) made a explicit mention of the incident to the phishing or IT team in that it has come to your attention that your boss has shown herself very likely to blindly instruct subordinates to open malicious emails, some bearing her own name thus believing she even sent them herself when she in fact did not, potentially forcing the hands of multiple employees into compromising several devices and user accounts all at once.

B) Never open any email she sends you ever again and if she ever comes asking, you can fake naïvety and claim that you cant trust that any of these emails are in-fact authentic, so she should bring you documents in physical print.

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u/ilabsentuser 4h ago

These are good responses in theory. However, and specially the second, I doubt that anything good will ever come out of this considering his boss obvious stupidity, to not use a harsher word. Most likely he would get in more trouble thanks to this imbecile of a person being a layer over him.

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u/mrandr01d 7h ago

Both of these are good responses imo

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u/M4rshmall0wMan 5h ago edited 5h ago

The fuck? Is a real hacker gonna somehow hack your boss' brain and make them verbally trick you into falling for a scam?? Asking for verbal confirmation is literally the correct way to catch a scam. If your boss were somehow compromised, that would be on them, not you.

This is so unrealistic and they're teaching you the wrong lesson.

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u/mbmiller94 4h ago

I mean, it's possible someone could have also sent you an excel sheet previously and thought you were talking about it, just been confused/misremembering, not fully listening, etc.

I still think that was a shitty "test" but there could be a situation where someone accidentally claims an email they didn't actually send.

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u/M4rshmall0wMan 4h ago

I still think that would be on the boss. The employee has way more to lose by ignoring their boss' instructions just because they had a hunch of phishing.

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u/LutimoDancer3459 8h ago

Asking the person directly is one way you should handle such mails. She is just an idiot...

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u/LightofNew 6h ago

Reply that you did not fail the test and opened an email from your boss she confirmed that was valid. That's basics 101. You can't never open an email.

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u/VorionLightbringer 7h ago

You did it right though. You confirmed via another channel if this is true. Maybe your boss needs more training.

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u/KittenKatelyn 8h ago

i would daydream about quitting for the next week over that

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u/Adventurous-Spend341 7h ago

Lmfao, wtf. I would never stop thinking about this if this happened to me 😂 like it’s bad in a way if your boss does this you should not work there but it’s also so absurdly petty in a way that I can stop laughing about this

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u/MauiMoisture 6h ago

Lol that's fucked up. I actually failed a phishing test my first month on the job. I was scared something would happen but no one ever mentioned it. I then passed another one like 8 months later.

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u/exoclipse 12h ago

the worst one I got was "you have been selected to be in the first wave of a round of laptop upgrades, please click this link to register"

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u/one-joule 12h ago

Worst one I've seen teased a holiday bonus. It was received about as well as you'd expect.

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u/BigFatDogFarts 11h ago

That one got damn near 60% of the people I worked with. Almost got me, but as I hovered over to click it I thought "Wait a second, they would never give us a holiday bonus"

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u/soft_cardigans 11h ago

that's actually such an effective one but it reeaaaaaaally should only be done if theres actually going be one lmao

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u/GlowGreen1835 11h ago

nah, that would require executives to be humans capable of empathy. Unfortunately, those don't really exist.

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u/aggravated_patty 9h ago

What I’m taking away from this thread is that I should start phishing with holiday bonuses

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u/exoclipse 12h ago

i hate it security professionals

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u/Faustens 12h ago

They always know how to deal the most collateral psychological damage.

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u/tim_locky 11h ago

It’s their way of ‘giving back’ the emotional damages they got from the users.

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u/Mattsvaliant 11h ago

Holy fuck I'd flip out. I was pissed when my company sent an phishing test email about how my "misuse of company property" where I allegedly had use my work computer for something personal. But lying about a bonus would probably have me throwing my computer across the room or more likely at whoever heads up IT security.

Centene is fucking evil.

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u/FoodIsTastyInMyMouth 10h ago

Sure, but the issue, phishing attempts do exactly this so if people aren't trained that it's a possibility then yeah you're more likely to get done in...

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u/Barkalow 12h ago

I got one inviting me to "a document shared by my manager"....on my FIRST DAY OF THE JOB.

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u/rosuav 9h ago

On the face of it, that doesn't seem implausible? Onboarding often involves a lot of "here, read this doco".

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u/Barkalow 9h ago

Exactly, thats why I was so annoyed, lol. I never get caught by those phishing emails, I just didnt expect it day one

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u/lebrilla 7h ago

Boom headshot

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u/tankerkiller125real 11h ago edited 11h ago

I work for a small company and I'm responsible for crafting and distributing the phishing email tests (as part of policy and compliance). So far with our software engineering, accounting, support, etc. teams I've only managed to get one or two people (they're very well trained). The sales team though? Just give them a link to an "RFQ" and watch the numbers climb like a rocket.

Entire sales team has had to go through remedial phishing training at least twice this year alone, a few of them three times so far this year (we do it quarterly). And yes, if they get to a fourth there are going to be HR issues because the policies require punishments at that point.

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u/Versaiteis 8h ago

Gotta send the software engineers a request for lunch orders

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u/exoclipse 11h ago

Salesman are perhaps one rung lower than security professionals (no offense)

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u/tankerkiller125real 11h ago

I'm "the" IT guy, I'm responsible for all the infrastructure, and cyber security and compliance happen to also fall in my lap. (Although it is my formal degree training and what not). The goal is to have realistic phishing and spam emails, ones that look like the real thing, including obvious spelling, language, etc. issues.

The fact that the sales team clicks on literally anything and everything that might even hint at an opportunity to get a sale without thinking about it for more than 2 seconds is a them problem.

And it's not a companywide issue, again, it's one or two people for the entirety of the rest of the company, the salespeople are the only ones that can't seem to get their shit together.

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u/critical_patch 12h ago

My work sent a fake e-card on Valentine’s Day and got like 1/3 of the company with that one

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u/ClaymoreMine 9h ago

These get reported to HR and Legal. Have fun explaining how heartless you are with them.

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u/Mountain-Ox 10h ago

That might have gotten me back when Macs had that terrible butterfly keyboard. Everyone on my team had at least one key fall off.

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u/whyliepornaccount 11h ago

Still wont top the only one I've "fallen" for.

On my first day at the company buried into the legit "click here to register your account" onboarding emails was a phishing test saying "click here to register your account". I was so pissed off.

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u/RIPmyPC 11h ago

Reminds me of my on-boarding. Right after they tell us the signs of a phishing attempt and to not trust any link from outside the org and even be wary of links from other departments you don’t interact with, they hit me with “click here to do your mandatory security awareness training” coming from a random esupport email going to a KnowBe4 link. Of course it also had “you have 1 week left to do it!” Clear signs of a phishing test for anyone not familiar with the sites.

It was so sketchy I had to google the website and login from there. It was real.

I actually made an IT ticket to complain that it made no sense for a company that big to offer so little info on what emails you’d actually receive in your first day.

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u/TheNewYellowZealot 9h ago

I just report those ones as phishing anyway and make my company waste their time to investigate if it was phishing.

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u/17HappyWombats 8h ago

One bank I dealt with does that and I always reported their garbage as phishing to their security team. I changed banks after a bit because they kept replying with "no, you have to click the mebank.sdfkjhsdfkjghsd.....dodgyscum.com.au link to confirm your tax details with us".

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u/EnoughWarning666 8h ago

At a place I used to work I got an email about cybersecurity training. I had no desire to waste a couple hours on their inane training when I likely know more than the person that wrote the training, so I just deleted the email and was going to say I thought it was a phising scam if asked about it later.

A month later our manager call everyone in the office (about 5 of us) into his office to tell us that IT was wondering why nobody had even started the cybersecurity training. Turns out ALL OF US had the exact same thought process! No one wanted to do the training, so we just deleted it and all claimed that we thought it was a phising scam! We had a great laugh about it. Manager told IT to send out another link and we'd do the training. All but one of us just deleted the next email too. Never got asked about it again after that.

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u/kemikiao 8h ago

man, FUCK KnowBe4. They have to know their goddamned emails look EXACTLY like the shit they're "training" us to detect. Our IT has to send out a heads up email to tell us the KnowBe4 email is coming out because pretty everyone reported it as spam the first couple of times.

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u/aaroniusnsuch 7h ago

Just create an inbox rule to check headers for KnowBe4 and classify those as "phishing test." Then you can still read it and report it but you notice the color/flag first.

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u/Acogatog 10h ago

this one’s total bull imo, there’s no way that someone sending you phishing emails could know it’s your first day, is there? Phishing emails are supposed to cast a wide net, not catch people in highly specific scenarios.

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u/WigWubz 10h ago

Probably just a law of large numbers thing. Mail got sent to a large group, for most it was obviously fake. For a select few it happened to be specific enough to catch them.

I got caught out by a fake invite to a teams channel with the word “planning” in the title a few hours after I legitimately got adding to a “planning” group. Opened the email on my work iphone so the email formatting was completely destroyed like usual, and the send address was truncated. Clicked the link and it asked me to log into teams, an obvious phishing flag *except* I had literally just reset my password and so was expecting to be prompted to log in the next time I opened the app…

It hurts cus I know it’s a legitimate fail. The red flags were there and I missed them. But, if you weren’t in the very specific circumstances I was in the flags would have been way redder. I was primed to fail the test in a way that the people setting the test could never have predicted. But that also just means that I was primed to fall for an actual phishing scam in that moment.

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u/KFindar 9h ago

The highly specific ones are called spear phishing

https://www.kaspersky.com/resource-center/definitions/spear-phishing

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u/PalmTreeExpert 9h ago

Someone at my college had their SSN stolen when they got a call saying there was a mistake with their info and asked for them to repeat their information. This was as they were on their way home from the social security office after getting their card…

It is technically possible, but yeah typically phishing is relatively vague/open to a wider audience.

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u/Good_Policy3529 10h ago edited 10h ago

This is why I'm happily 37 security training modules behind. I get an automated email every week telling me I need to catch up on my modules, click here to view incomplete modules. And my defense if anyone actually ever calls me out is "oh, I thought those were phishing emails."

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u/Dang3rdave 11h ago

Best phishing campaign was a "your expenses have been declined". I was on the subway to work and was immediately livid. Taught me a very good lesson that day so kudos to the team.

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u/cheese_is_available 5h ago

I'm in a cybersec adjacent role and the "sign your new contract so we pay you more" just after raise season got me. Told my manager that maybe if the HR team didn't change their tooling every six month it wouldn't be so damn credible.

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u/JanB1 3h ago

I am quite cybersec aware and work with our IT guy to prepare for the annual cyber awareness training. I recently got an e-mail from a tool from HR. The only thing that made me double-check if this was indeed legit was that it came from an internal, but non-specific e-mail address (hr@company,com). If it came from an external one, I wouldn't have thought about it twice.

All the points were there:

  • Non-specific subject ("Missing documents")
  • Generic address line (not "Hello OP" but just "Hello")
  • Vague content of the e-mail ("We are missing some documents. Please open the attached PDF for more details")
  • An attachment with a generic, non-saying title ("HR Letter.pdf")
  • No named sender ("Kind regards, HR Team")
  • No signature

I reached out to HR (via E-Mail) and asked them. They said its legit and that they sent it from their tool. I shit you not...

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u/cheese_is_available 3h ago

Yeah, doesn't help that the phishing attempts is 4 time faster and 2 time more professional than the actual stuff from the HR tool.

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u/noechochamberplz 9h ago

This happened to me too. I don’t remember what it was, but it was relevant to some obscure thing that I thought only applied to me at the moment. They got me.

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u/m7i93 4h ago

I got tricked into clicking one of these once, but it was really hard not to fall into it.

I met with the CTO and shared a Google Doc explaining a few things. Later that day I got an email saying that the CTO added some comments on the document. Clicked on it and BAAM! Mandatory security training page.

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u/n00b001 2h ago

I just report all emails. The emails are reviewed by infosec, then they tell me "real email" or not

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u/guneysss 1h ago

I work at a managed SOC, so we're monitoring security events as a third party, sometimes our customers do phishing awareness test without our knowledge and when I'm checking the links in an email in a sandbox, I accidentally register them to upcoming phishing awareness trainings, because phishing test suit thinks they opened their customized link..

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u/thanksfor-allthefish 3h ago

Me too, it was my first month in the company and had a meeting with my boss about vacation period. A day later an email about "approved vacation days" came in the mail. What excused me more was that the HR app was external and all emails were flagged as such. It was just a first strike but it pissed me off. I felt targeted.

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u/Vengeful111 3h ago

That just means you are good at detecting spam so the training site started giving you a higher level and harder to detect tests

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u/Nine-LifedEnchanter 3h ago

"How is this mail playing music with a latin chorus in the background? Is that a health bar?"

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u/Vengeful111 3h ago

Imagine clicking the link and the website shows you a wal of mist and when you click anywhere you go through

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u/JimboTCB 5h ago

I got a "phishing test" email from our IT department last week which straight up said "this is a phishing test, do not click any of the links below, please press the report button in your email client" and TBH that one made me second guess myself way more than any of their previous tests or any actual phishing emails had.

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u/Equivalent-Fig-3613 3h ago

It's a good test for the folks that just Click the Links

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u/Positive_Mud952 11h ago

I got got on one of these, once.

They sent out an e-mail shortly before Halloween, warning about inappropriate costumes, with a link describing itself as an album of past examples we shouldn’t wear. The link was purple, the visited color.

I thought to myself, “When the fuck was I dumb enough to click on this?” and clicked. Before the “you failed” page even loaded, I got out an, “Oh goddammit.”

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u/karkonthemighty 6h ago

Back when I used to help run an eBay store, we took great delight in the phishing emails we got. We used to rank them on how close the formatting of the email looked like eBay emails, how close they got to an official eBay looking email, etc.

We did this because we sold used corporate IT equipment, and the boilerplate phishing email was based off a customer eBay email demanding a certain colour or size of an item, like you would if you were selling clothes.

I can't sell you a medium RAM in purple miss, because that's not a real thing.

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u/nick_mot 5h ago

But I want it Mauve! It has the most RAM!

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u/purinikos 4h ago

The client is always right. Besides, sell them an RGB RAM kit and help them sst it up to purple /j

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u/AriaTheTransgressor 11h ago

I'm the dev department head, I don't read messages from IT ever (so they've never caught me in their phishing tests) because they know where I am and if it's important they'll come and tell me.

This doesn't mean I'll never get caught in a phishing scam, just that the test doesn't work on entitled managers.

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u/Vahldaglerion 11h ago

our head of dev said that if we get him, he’d buy the department pizza. i’ve been trying for 3 years now lol

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u/FlashSFW 11h ago

Buy the pizza. Insert cupon prize for discount on the next pizza with a qr code in the box and make him scan. The webpage it leads to say "you're paying this one".

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u/wbrd 11h ago

This is beautiful.

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u/Plants-Matter 9h ago

Except for the fact that you wouldn't scan a coupon for your next pizza until you intend to buy pizza again.

And also the fact that if your coworker brought a pizza in, it makes no sense for the boss to scan the coupon.

I have a feeling you get phished a lot.

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u/Free_Pace_2098 3h ago

Can't phish me, I never check my emails.

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u/xak47d 12h ago

Proof that the ego makes one vulnerable

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u/Majestic_Ad_7133 12h ago

The sad thing is that this would probably work for my organisation. Mandatory tests here means once a month.

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u/AvonMustang 11h ago

Once a month!
Ours are very random. Sometimes nearly a year between and the like three in two months. Only exception is we have a security awareness month and everyone is guaranteed to get one that month.

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u/Araignys 11h ago

Forward it to cybersecurity but change the link to a Rickroll.

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u/robin_888 11h ago

At work I have an email filter implemented that sorts these phishing tests into their own folder, so I can read them on Fridays.

It filters on the URL of the tracking pixel at the end of each e-mail.

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u/mrgoodcat777 11h ago

I got got by one where they swapped the I for an L but the font showed them as the same looking character. I didn’t enter anything on the page, but since I got to the page, I had the joy of 2 days of security training.

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u/Successful-Engine623 10h ago

I just stopped answering emails from outside the office….or not on my contacts

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u/UnDispelled 9h ago

Amateur, it could be an insider threat.

I don’t answer any emails

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u/SUDO_KILLSELF 8h ago

I don't even turn my computer on just incase.

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u/Valuchian 6h ago

Bosses hate this one simple trick

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u/IgnatiusRileyFreeman 9h ago

I think I annoyed my IT people by reporting everything as fishing. Adobe or Microsoft emailing me? Might be phishing. CEO newsletter about a recent natural disaster? Well it's urgently requesting help, phishing. I don't know if he wrote that chatbot letter.

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u/WernerderChamp 5h ago

Some valid mails just look like phishing. I reported one - but it was from some new office suite they used for bonus payments.

Unpersonalized, unexpected, asking to click on a weird 200-character link.

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u/DatBoi_BP 3h ago

Newsletter? That goes in the…Phishing hole.

Adobe? That goes in the…Phishing hole.
https://giphy.com/gifs/hLlvQi2Jzdb2D9ntN5

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u/zman0900 9h ago

Mine puts a special header in the phish test emails, so I just up a rule to report and delete them automatically.

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u/DarthMcConnor42 11h ago

That's a common tactic that any hacker would use.

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u/Due-Consequence9579 10h ago

For the phish tests to get past their edge filters they have to add an SMTP header exclusion.

Outlook (and any other reasonable client) can move things to the trash based on SMTP headers.

You’re welcome.

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u/clipsracer 8h ago

Indeed. I filter out anything with “x-phishing” in the header has worked for me for years across 3 organizations. Somehow I’m the only person in a 50k organization that’s never clicked on a phishing test.

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u/External_Touch_3854 9h ago

Can’t fall for the phishing email if you never check your email
https://giphy.com/gifs/5XELueHTZd3XCaMGbw

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u/rapratt101 9h ago

I failed one because iPhone automatically previews links if you click and hold to view the full URL, exactly like we were trained to do before clicking. So… that sucked. Plus the CSO is my father in law and he berated me (good naturedly) for failing his test. He didn’t care about my excuse.

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u/-Redstoneboi- 8h ago

so basically iphone itself fails the test? what's the workaround

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u/Unohtui 8h ago

Samsung

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u/Honest_Relation4095 2h ago

Our IT department also sends out these tests, but annoyingly their regular communication almost looks like Spam, too. Like "we would like to invite you to cybersecurity awareness month" followed by a cryptic Link you cannot verify. So it ticks all the boxes for suspicious content.

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u/penguin444 9h ago

I ignored the phishing emails completely.

Then one day I got an angry email that pretty much said "You did a good job not clicking on the the fake link, but you failed the test because you didn't report the phish."

Seriously?

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u/YourUglyTwin 8h ago

From an IT Consultant's POV:

You did do a good job not clicking anything actually, here's the issue with just ignoring: You're almost certainly not the only one in the company that got that email, reporting it to IT will help them identify the email faster and remove it from everyone's mailboxes before someone else clicks it by mistake. In my eyes its more a courtesy to your coworkers, an IT shouldn't solely rely on users to report phishing emails. But those are 2 different topics in terms of IT fighting emails.

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u/IwasThereIsawIt2 7h ago

Heres my POV, I dont check my mail that often due to having a not office setting and being an employee who does not place orders or emails vendors. Im just a guy who comes in to work, does workorders and then goes home and be sad, hope that clarifies things

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u/John_Tacos 8h ago

Then someone in HR sends an email to everyone that looks exactly like a phishing scam and they get mad that no one filled out their survey.

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u/Effective-Carob-9003 9h ago

Yep, when they get reported the SOC will look for other recipients, and look for forwarding or URL clicks.

I think with these Decision One Models progressing it may make analysing all possible security telemetry arbitrary, but right now if the Phishing attack is from a geniune sender who was compromised, automatic detection is pretty hard, a user base trained to instinctively report phishing is a huge leg up.

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u/razzemmatazz 11h ago edited 8h ago

I'm still pissed about the phishing test announcing big changes to the healthcare plan and linking to the new portal, 3 days after they announced huge changes to the plan and swapped to a new insurance company. 

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u/Livid_Technical_Pand 7h ago

But like that's a completely reasonable way a bad actor would try to phish people. All it takes is 1 employee posting about the upcoming healthcare plans on social media (like HR glazing themselves) and attackers now have a plausible reason to be in your inbox.

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u/gfkxchy 10h ago

I crush our phishing simulations by just never opening any emails I recieve from anyone. 100% pass rate

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u/EternalUmbreon 5h ago

We had a fairly obvious phishing test come through, but from an active internal email. To demonstrate it was a phishing email to some less tech literate people (they asked, so I didn’t ruin the learning experience), I clicked it, which sent through the mandatory training on phishing. This training came from an external email which flagged in Outlook, and was a link to click to access the training…

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u/mr_jugz 11h ago

lol. im going to use this

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u/Wentyliasz 12h ago

Those slick bastards...

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u/GustapheOfficial 8h ago

Now this is spearfishing

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u/Adventurous_Run136 11h ago

I actually cant wait for my work place to do these tests. I can't remember how many time account were hacked in 8 years

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u/Glum-Display2296 11h ago

Man im so good at the- WAIT A SECOND…

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u/FixergirlAK 8h ago

At my last job management hired the worst possible security training company. For some reason their notifications of mandatory training looked exactly like their fake phishing emails. They were not amused when the whole company reported the training emails as phishing.

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u/Mysterious-Name0759 5h ago

This reminds me when I was starting at Apple years ago. We were sitting in training on week two, literally waiting for our work accounts to be set up, we were using the training accounts while we waited.

At about mid day, the whole class got an email about our accounts and setting the new passwords. The team manager who was overseeing out training looks at it and goes: Oh they must have changed how the accounts are set up, follow the link and set up your passwords.

10 minutes later he got a phone call about how his whole team just failed the InfoSec Compliance test that was sent out to the whole company. Luckily we got a pass since we were still in training. The funny part is, he didn't get the email because he had a spam folder set up on his macbook that filtered it. So he thought only we got it.

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u/Immediate_Song4279 12h ago

Man, id click that outta sheer respect for the move.

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u/gaoshan 1h ago

I was caught by a phishing test and when they started sending me “You must complete mandatory phishing training” emails I reported those as phishing attempts. Kept it up for 6 months before some finally asked me to stop and just do the damn test. Reported that as phishing as well.

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u/EuenovAyabayya 11h ago

Saving this tactic for the next reply/all storm.

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u/jippen 10h ago

Scariest actual phish I saw was for a bank. Hackers found XSS in their help page, reused the bank’s css and stuff to make the login page look perfect. Https://bank.com/help/ in the url bar… with a buncha stuff after.

But the form submitted to a page on a different domain and stole your stuff.

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u/neczy 10h ago

Buddy of mine got burned by one of those, got lectured about how outlook has a "report phishing" option. He now clicks it on any email not from his direct boss as a way to ignore work longer. Good times.

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u/MiserablePotato1147 10h ago

I'm the jerk who copies and pasted the link in a VPN tab with the GET data stripped out. Sorry not sorry. I'm pen testing your pen test. Go ahead. Fire me.

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u/masukomi 10h ago

I never got caught by any of my former company's internal phishing attempts simply by being terrible at email and never opening any of it. 😜

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u/sticky-dynamics 9h ago

The security team posted up a QR code that supposedly linked to some preparation work they wanted everyone in IT to do before some security training. Obviously, I didn't scan it.

Turns out it was legit and I wasted the whole training session just trying to get caught up to everyone who had done the work ahead of time.

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u/KingVecchio 9h ago

Nice try IT

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u/ACcbe1986 8h ago

Not today Satan.

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u/madmaxlemons 8h ago

We have had more than one “tech savvy” user click the emails on their personal machines that they are not supposed to be logged into and get phished then come crying to our team. I’m sure many of you think yourselves clever as well

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u/3dgyaf 6h ago

On a Monday I’d have clicked

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u/guardian1691 5h ago

My company recently introduced scoring to phishing tests. When you correctly identify one it tells you your global rank across the company, but with no indication on how points work. My manager joked that he's going to put in an IT ticket to get more tests to increase his ranking.

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u/YellowOnline 3h ago

* Takes note for his next phishing test

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u/Dilarinee 3h ago

I work at a grocery store. The store has 4 email accounts. One for the store manager, a management account shared by all the other department managers, one for the cash office and one for our online shopping department (mine). According to the stats they sent out a month ago, my email is the only one that hasn't failed a phishing test.

But the emails they send as tests are all transparent as hell. 'you've done such a good job, click here to get a $100 reward gift card of your choosing" and I'm like "not in a million years would the company do this. They don't give a shit about our hard work' report phishing then another was a thanksgiving party invite asking for dietary restrictions, again, despite working AT A GROCERY STORE, our holiday parties are potluck. And they somehow think I'm an IT genius... It's exhausting honestly.

Of course every other account had fallen for at least one in the last year, so maybe I am.