I read an article about ransomware affecting the public transportation service in Kansas, and I wanted to ask how this can happen. Wikipedia says these are “are typically carried out using a Trojan, entering a system through, for example, a malicious attachment, embedded link in a phishing email, or a vulnerability in a network service,” but how? Wouldn’t someone still have to deliberately click a malicious link to install it? Wouldn’t anyone working for such an agency be educated enough about these threats not to do so?
I wanted to ask in that community, but I was afraid this is such a basic question that I felt foolish posting it there. Does anyone know the exact process by which this typically can happen? I’ve seen how scammers can do this to individuals with low tech literacy by watching Kitboga, but what about these big agencies?
Edit: After reading some of the responses, it’s made me realize why IT often wants to heavily restrict what you can do on a work PC, which is frustrating from an end user perspective, but if people are just clicking links in emails and not following basic internet safety, then damn.
Ahahhahhahha. Ahem. Hahahahahaha. Give me a moment to compose myself.
Thank you for that moment.
Anyway, the assumption is very reasonable. And, oh how I wish it were so.
But the answer is no, they’re human, and even high tech organizations need specialists in other subjects (law, finance, book-keeping, etc) who aren’t at all technology savy.
To be clear, education is such subjects is often mandatory. It just doesn’t always take. Largely because many staff watch the educational video, and think they understood it, but don’t really have any context for it. For example, they might learn it and still think, “Well, it clealy doesn’t apply to an email from our CEO. He wouldn’t send something nasty!”
Edit: The solution I’ve seen is a lot of education. It’s not enough to say “don’t click suspicious links”, there’s got to be ongoing training on the definition of “suspicious”.
The security team at the company I work for sends out test phishing emails and if you fall for it they make you change your password. I think this annoyance helps people learn to pay attention. It doesn’t seem like we have had to do as many resets due to these as time goes on.
I’ve flagged several suspicious looking but actually legit emails that were originated by internal groups but used very scammy sounding language (warning of dire consequences, extreme urgency, links to external websites as reference to something claimed to be internal process…)
Hopefully those departments sending emails like that get some education too…
Stay suspicious. As a security guy, i’d way rather respond to 1,000 false positive reports than have an employee that doesn’t think about it and just clicks.
This works IMO. Our company used to do this. Hell, I even fell for one once, which is some shameful shit considering I work in the tech industry. That shame enough though has kept me more on toes ever since.
I almost fell for the last one they did. It was disguised as a link to a shared item on teams that that asked for your creds and I assumed it was another shitty half baked Microsoft thing that single sign in wasn’t working on. The only reason I didn’t log into it was because I was like “fuck it I’ll just open it from teams instead” only to find that it wasn’t in Teams.
Yes, this makes sense. I can also say from observing co-workers at different jobs, any training that’s provided virtually (e.g., you just watch a video and answer some questions), is mostly a waste of time. I can say that I and some others took these trainings seriously, but most people did not and would jump through the hoop as mindlessly as possible.
I saw this a lot when I worked as a CNA. People would just answer the questions right, “pass” the training, and then continue doing things in the same wrong way they’d always done things.