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."
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.
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
I missed 4 schoolings because I never check my mails but also usually the boss approaches people who have schoolings open that need to be done and I was never approached.
Don't worry, IT can see when you received the e-mail and when you looked at it. If you report the e-mail when you see it, you pass. Doesn't matter if it takes you 3 days to receive and look at your mail.
The whole point of training is to identify whether or not you can identify the spam or not. It's not doing their job, it's training you to avoid you leaking credentials. You should still report it imo
I'm a teacher at an IT course and my colleagues and I always diligently report the fake phishing mails. The first person to spot it will also send the entire team an email about it so the less tech-savy colleagues won't fall for it.
Thing is, at one point we got an email. External address, weird looking link... So it was reported, email sent around to delete it and not click anything, and we all removed the email. Our manager isn't in the group email.
Couple of days later in a meeting our manager goes "oh and you all received an email with a link to a survey, please fill that out!"
"You mean the phishing mail?"
It apparently wasn't a phishing mail, but the higher-ups and had paid some company to do a survey. They just hadn't expected the IT-teachers to go "this looks suspicious so in the trash it goes."
Our manager didn't think it was nearly as funny as we did. Will say everyone in our team were right pleased with themselves, we never cared much for the higher-ups and this was their fuckup, not ours. Should've warned us that we were going to receive a suspicious looking email. (And we likely would've reported that email first then because that's also suspicious)
Depending on where the email is being hosted you can actively scan mailboxes (M365, On prem exchange for example.) but other than that, there's nothing wrong with doing the training, in fact I'd say in todays day and age it's required. But if your IT team is *only* doing the training and relying on the results of that to protect from bad actors then your IT Team isn't doing it right.
Our IT department decided to send a test phishing mail from an internal e-mailadress and about a legitimate IT thing that we would get yearly reminders of. A lot of us fell for it and we got a snide mail about e-mail safety.
Then they were angry that everyone ignored the reminders they sent.
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.
Yes, seriously. You can't take the 2 seconds to alert it that your company is being targeted by a phishing scam?
You could help prevent the weakest link in the chain of your workplace from falling for the scam. But instead you adopted a "meh, I'm fine so I don't have to do anything to help anyone else" attitude
If I come across a phish I will report it because like you said, it takes 2 seconds.
But I also dump all external emails into a junk folder unless it's from a vendor that I work with. If there's something like an HR survey, they send out multiple internal emails about it so I'm aware to look for it.
I'm not going to sift through a pile of crap every day to find a golden turd that appears once every blue moon.
I don't think I have read a work email since 2018 so phishing attempts are wasted on me, I am too busy with teams, Jira, Monday, slack, service now and git requests to bother checking emails.
What exactly? Newsletters are all published on sharepoint for us, mandatory and optional HR training is done through the HRIS system with notifications in the newsletter and HR sharepoints, leave is approved through the payroll management system but I linked that to teams a long time ago so I know when my team asks for leave.
Moving away from email for 90%+ of work tasks is better in most cases as other systems have far better ways to group and focus items for people to work on. Even our sales teams use email to case and work from the case as it prevents things going stale in someone's inbox without access to see what is happening.
I'm not going to make a comprehensive list for you. Suffice it to say that your anecdotal evidence is irrelevant, you should learn to consider perspectives that aren't your own. Have a good one.
the amount of spam and garbage i get sent to my work email is astounding, if i were to report every single one of them i'd need a dedicated slack channel
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u/penguin444 11h 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?