My company is using some tool to generate those kinds of false scam emails every few weeks, so I created a rule in Outlook that if the header contains the word “gophish”, it put a label “lol phishing” on it, so I know to just delete them…
The Microsoft 365 admins at my workplace were doing something like this. It’s got some sort of built-in phishing simulation functionality (I think it’s this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/attack-simulation-training-simulations). The idea is that you click a button in Outlook to report it as suspicious, and get a “congrats you did the right thing” notice.
However, it seems like IT security were unaware of the test, because they started blocking the emails and blackholed the domain the emails linked to (meaning it doesn’t resolve on our network any more). They also reported the domain as phishing to some safe browsing vendor we use, which propagated into the blocklist Chrome uses. It was a shared domain Microsoft use for this training (it was one of the domains on this list: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/attack-simulation-training-get-started?view=o365-worldwide) so Microsoft probably had to deal with un-blocking it…
Ugh. I got one of them recently and clicking on it and hitting report as spam apparently registers as me having interacted with the email so I have to do the security course again.
Damn. I’ve scripted out the entire process of verifying an owned domain in a hosted mail providers system, deploying the ec2 infrastructure, and installing and configuring gophish for a campaign, along with tearing everything down.
That header thing gophish adds is a default option that you can override by just setting that header to an empty string. Whoever runs campaigns for your employer either wants to make it easy for you to pass or doesn’t care about their job at all.
I’ve done it in the context of red team/adversary emulation campaigns before though, so the opsec needed to be a bit tighter than the mandatory phishing awareness stuff i guess.
Ours do that too. It’s so obvious that I’m not sure if they think we’re all stupid, except then I remember that some of my coworkers actually are stupid, so it’s probably aimed at them.
I’ve worked with a dude for years who I would consider smart both technically and non-technically. One time we got an email at work with an attachment that was something like “microsoft_update.exe.txt”. The email said “due to a technical limitation on the email system, this file needs to be renamed to drop the .txt and executed to apply a critical to your computer.”
It was, in my mind, such an obvious phishing attempt that I laughed out loud and said “who the fuck would ever fall for this?” Then my coworker popped his head over the cube wall and said “WAIT WHAT? We weren’t supposed to run that?!”
Fortunately, the security team sat nearby and heard the whole thing and rushed over to quarantine his PC
Even a smart person can have a bad day / moment of weakness. If you are super busy / stressed out and some email comes that looks like a bullshit request from HR or IT or whatever, it can be tempting to just try to knock it off your plate real quick so you can get back to whatever fire you were fighting.
My tactic these days is I pretty much don’t click on ANYTHING in an email, so it’s an ingrained habit. If it’s a link to something, it’s usually one I can navigate to myself using my browser. If it’s an attachment, we use a file sharing system that stores these so I can just go to that and see what’s in there.
It’s inconvenient, and you don’t always have these work-around options, but by trying to make into an automatic habit, it has saved me a couple of times.
You DONT want to turn it off. Digital forensics work WAAAAAAY better if you have a memory dump of the system. And all the memory is lost if you turn it off. Even if the virus ran 10h ago and the program has long stoped running, there will most likely still be traces in the RAM. Like a hard drive, simply deleting something in RAM doesn’t mean it is gone. As long as that specific area was not written over later it will still hold the same contenta. You can sometimes find memory that belonged to a virus days or even weeks after the infection if the system was never shut down. There is so much information in ram that is lost when the power is turned off.
You want to
1: quarantine from network (don’t pull the cable at the system, but firewall it at the switch if possible)
2: take a full copy of the RAM
2.5: read out bitlocker keys if the drive is encrypted.
3: turn off and take a bitwise copy of the hard drive or just send the drive + memory dump to the forensics team.
4: get coffee
There’s an older guy in my group who rants and raves about how all the new training is a waste of time. Discrimination, harassment, safety, information security, all of it. But he specifically hates the fraud and phishing training.
He’s the only one in our group that has failed any of the test emails.
Lmao, the other day I had to whitelist some domains used for phishing training emails in the anti-phishing software we use just so they wouldn’t get nuked, then I had to whitelist them in another anti-phishing software so they wouldn’t have - huge red header injected on the top of the email body warning the user it was phishing.
It varies depending on your email client and the fake phishing service / implementation. (Sorry, I hate non-specific answers like this, too). For me, all I had to do was add an Outlook rule that looks for a certain keyword in the email header. The keyword is a weird/unique string that’s only associated with the fake phishing company. If that word is anywhere in the email header, my rule chucks it into a folder where I just ignore it. Your client should let you view the header / raw email and you can look for a pattern that way.
It’s a pretty safe rule as far as email rules go. The only risk I can think of is that it could lull me into complacency, but working for the man does that, anyway. I’ve been getting away with it for over a year, and it’s nice not seeing the dumbass fake phishing things. Note that we are not mandated to report them, but we get assigned extra training if we click on any links in them. Your employer may have different rules.
Alternatively, over-report. Spelling mistake on an email from a colleague? Seems phishy to me. Email from a colleague with an attachment? Phishy! Unsolicited email from a client? Phishy! Email from ‘social committee’ sent to everyone in the team? Phishy!!!
I have to initiate those, or it looks bad for compliance. We sell software, we get SOC 2 attestations yearly. We start getting points marked off for very general security and compliance measures customers will question our products and not renew or not purchase in the first place, because if we can’t even secure our own employees and promote awareness, what does that say about our product?
Sincerely, the guy everyone hates and makes your work life harder.
Yeah my company sets a goal of how many you need to report every year, if you don’t then you need to take mandatory training (same if you fail and click on a link)
Where I work, they haven’t taken it that far yet. But I would not be surprised if they go to that in the future. The email rules / filters can still help with it.
We’re supposed to forward the spear fishing emails to IT but I always just report as spam and go about my day. Was only nervous the first couple times I ignored an obvious internal phishing test but apparently they don’t care if we don’t fall for it.
Mine was like that too so I just deleted them and moved on. I sat right next to the security team and would thus know when they were going out, so they gave no shits as long as you didn’t fall for it.
It also helped that my team was the only in the company that didn’t really get email. Everyone else got hundreds a day (no joke, they used way too many mail lists) and we got maybe 5-10, all internal or auto-generated, so everything was super obvious, and IT was well aware of this.
I will think about this every time we have a meeting to discuss the stupid “shame and train” faux phishing attacks they run on us at work.
Pro-Tip: If you set up the right kind of filtering you’ll never see those stupid things. (Fight club rules).
I worked at a place that actually tracked whether you reported the fake phishing emails or not…
The right email rule can make that easier, too. Hee hee
My company is using some tool to generate those kinds of false scam emails every few weeks, so I created a rule in Outlook that if the header contains the word “gophish”, it put a label “lol phishing” on it, so I know to just delete them…
shhhhhhh.
Good for you, though.
The Microsoft 365 admins at my workplace were doing something like this. It’s got some sort of built-in phishing simulation functionality (I think it’s this: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/attack-simulation-training-simulations). The idea is that you click a button in Outlook to report it as suspicious, and get a “congrats you did the right thing” notice.
However, it seems like IT security were unaware of the test, because they started blocking the emails and blackholed the domain the emails linked to (meaning it doesn’t resolve on our network any more). They also reported the domain as phishing to some safe browsing vendor we use, which propagated into the blocklist Chrome uses. It was a shared domain Microsoft use for this training (it was one of the domains on this list: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/defender-office-365/attack-simulation-training-get-started?view=o365-worldwide) so Microsoft probably had to deal with un-blocking it…
Plenty of companies will assign you extra training because you aren’t reporting.
The usual “dance, monkey, dance” from corporate.
The Internet: fuck these companies for leaking my data.
Also the Internet: fuck taking these classes on security and forcing me to reread policies and sops.
Fucked if you do, fucked if you didn’t.
Hey, if running a business was easy, everyone would be doing it. We can’t have that.
Ugh. I got one of them recently and clicking on it and hitting report as spam apparently registers as me having interacted with the email so I have to do the security course again.
It’s glitchy AF. There’s a known bug where it can report you if you simply preview the email, too. In some environments, anyway.
The one they use at my work is extra silly, as it adds an extra email header saying it’s coming from a phishing campaign
haha same for me, the header contains the word “gophish”, easy to filter it
Damn. I’ve scripted out the entire process of verifying an owned domain in a hosted mail providers system, deploying the ec2 infrastructure, and installing and configuring gophish for a campaign, along with tearing everything down.
That header thing gophish adds is a default option that you can override by just setting that header to an empty string. Whoever runs campaigns for your employer either wants to make it easy for you to pass or doesn’t care about their job at all.
I’ve done it in the context of red team/adversary emulation campaigns before though, so the opsec needed to be a bit tighter than the mandatory phishing awareness stuff i guess.
Ours do that too. It’s so obvious that I’m not sure if they think we’re all stupid, except then I remember that some of my coworkers actually are stupid, so it’s probably aimed at them.
I’ve worked with a dude for years who I would consider smart both technically and non-technically. One time we got an email at work with an attachment that was something like “microsoft_update.exe.txt”. The email said “due to a technical limitation on the email system, this file needs to be renamed to drop the .txt and executed to apply a critical to your computer.”
It was, in my mind, such an obvious phishing attempt that I laughed out loud and said “who the fuck would ever fall for this?” Then my coworker popped his head over the cube wall and said “WAIT WHAT? We weren’t supposed to run that?!”
Fortunately, the security team sat nearby and heard the whole thing and rushed over to quarantine his PC
Even a smart person can have a bad day / moment of weakness. If you are super busy / stressed out and some email comes that looks like a bullshit request from HR or IT or whatever, it can be tempting to just try to knock it off your plate real quick so you can get back to whatever fire you were fighting.
My tactic these days is I pretty much don’t click on ANYTHING in an email, so it’s an ingrained habit. If it’s a link to something, it’s usually one I can navigate to myself using my browser. If it’s an attachment, we use a file sharing system that stores these so I can just go to that and see what’s in there.
It’s inconvenient, and you don’t always have these work-around options, but by trying to make into an automatic habit, it has saved me a couple of times.
You mean shut it off and steal and the Ethernet cable? Lol
You DONT want to turn it off. Digital forensics work WAAAAAAY better if you have a memory dump of the system. And all the memory is lost if you turn it off. Even if the virus ran 10h ago and the program has long stoped running, there will most likely still be traces in the RAM. Like a hard drive, simply deleting something in RAM doesn’t mean it is gone. As long as that specific area was not written over later it will still hold the same contenta. You can sometimes find memory that belonged to a virus days or even weeks after the infection if the system was never shut down. There is so much information in ram that is lost when the power is turned off.
You want to 1: quarantine from network (don’t pull the cable at the system, but firewall it at the switch if possible) 2: take a full copy of the RAM 2.5: read out bitlocker keys if the drive is encrypted. 3: turn off and take a bitwise copy of the hard drive or just send the drive + memory dump to the forensics team. 4: get coffee
Why would you be doing digital forensics?
To find out if nuking that one workstation is enough or if you have to take more drastic measures.
I feel like most companies wouldn’t bother with all that. They’d probably just nuke the workstation and call it a day.
I work in IT and have done these campaigns, if you’re on Lemmy, you’re probably not the target audience lmao
There’s an older guy in my group who rants and raves about how all the new training is a waste of time. Discrimination, harassment, safety, information security, all of it. But he specifically hates the fraud and phishing training.
He’s the only one in our group that has failed any of the test emails.
That’s really funny. It’s like you work for Dunder-Mifflin.
Lots of us do lol
Lmao, the other day I had to whitelist some domains used for phishing training emails in the anti-phishing software we use just so they wouldn’t get nuked, then I had to whitelist them in another anti-phishing software so they wouldn’t have - huge red header injected on the top of the email body warning the user it was phishing.
Our company has started doing that. How do I filter them out?
It varies depending on your email client and the fake phishing service / implementation. (Sorry, I hate non-specific answers like this, too). For me, all I had to do was add an Outlook rule that looks for a certain keyword in the email header. The keyword is a weird/unique string that’s only associated with the fake phishing company. If that word is anywhere in the email header, my rule chucks it into a folder where I just ignore it. Your client should let you view the header / raw email and you can look for a pattern that way.
It’s a pretty safe rule as far as email rules go. The only risk I can think of is that it could lull me into complacency, but working for the man does that, anyway. I’ve been getting away with it for over a year, and it’s nice not seeing the dumbass fake phishing things. Note that we are not mandated to report them, but we get assigned extra training if we click on any links in them. Your employer may have different rules.
Alternatively, over-report. Spelling mistake on an email from a colleague? Seems phishy to me. Email from a colleague with an attachment? Phishy! Unsolicited email from a client? Phishy! Email from ‘social committee’ sent to everyone in the team? Phishy!!!
Received an email about phishing? Oh, you better believe that’s phishy!
Please don’t.
I have to initiate those, or it looks bad for compliance. We sell software, we get SOC 2 attestations yearly. We start getting points marked off for very general security and compliance measures customers will question our products and not renew or not purchase in the first place, because if we can’t even secure our own employees and promote awareness, what does that say about our product?
Sincerely, the guy everyone hates and makes your work life harder.
Maybe don’t gaslight people and they wouldn’t respond by assuming everything is more gaslighting.
I have done some minor malicious compliance / prankster sabotage sort-of like that in the past. I got called on the carpet. It was fun, though!
except too many companies take that extra step of being annoying:
Yeah my company sets a goal of how many you need to report every year, if you don’t then you need to take mandatory training (same if you fail and click on a link)
you also fail if you use the right form but don’t staple a cover sheet for the tps form followup.
Where I work, they haven’t taken it that far yet. But I would not be surprised if they go to that in the future. The email rules / filters can still help with it.
We’re supposed to forward the spear fishing emails to IT but I always just report as spam and go about my day. Was only nervous the first couple times I ignored an obvious internal phishing test but apparently they don’t care if we don’t fall for it.
Mine was like that too so I just deleted them and moved on. I sat right next to the security team and would thus know when they were going out, so they gave no shits as long as you didn’t fall for it.
It also helped that my team was the only in the company that didn’t really get email. Everyone else got hundreds a day (no joke, they used way too many mail lists) and we got maybe 5-10, all internal or auto-generated, so everything was super obvious, and IT was well aware of this.