A lot of hacking is actually social engineering. It’s not hard to get a tech-illiterate person to give up their password, and that’s the softest target for an attack.
I prefer the old “drop a usb in the parking lot”
Be sure to put a label on it that says “secrets!”
Nowadays you’d probably be more likely to get a hit by putting an “Anime titties” label on the drive
I’m interested.
Why would you drop a drive full of world news?
I prefer a label that says, “Warning: USB stick contains scary virus. Do not plug into a computer”
I bet someone still would
It’s what sandboxes are for.
There are usb sticks that can kill your pc by getting charged and then discharging all the electricity at once to your pc so no sandbox will save you in situations like those.
the softest target
Managment making notes
All employess must be buff! Fitness trainings for everyone are now mandatory! Problem solved.Or even jaded tech savvy people. I work in IT and there have been a number of times that I have witnessed or heard about people who know better causing an incident because they’re burnt out or irate.
“Wait a second…I don’t give a shit about this company.”
This seems like there is an idea for a joke or a comic here somewhere…
Happy employees are less likely to be socially engineered? Wow shocker
Hacker voice: “I’m in”
Looks at overly complicated industry software he’s never even heard of before
“I’m out”
“Looks like these guys have already been hit with ransomware.”
So SAP.
Wait, I have an idea! Yes, just as I thought, I can overlay their proprietary operating system with this fancy looking graphical interface that resembles nothing and gain full control of their system. I’m back in!
That sounds like Grafana with extra steps.
I was thinking of the James Bond movies where they show hacking to be a guy wearing glasses looking for a glowing ball in a flashing GUI that he rotates around somehow by typing really fast.
So they have a fancy representation of … something with a hex table, that then transforms into a map of London given the right key?
We have these obligatory online seminars about web security /privacy at work.
Turns out that for some reason, with Privacy Badger enabled, they appear as “passed” instantly. I never saw a single second of these endless seminars.
I tried to tell the IT guy but he couldn’t care less and I suspect he didn’t even know what Privacy Badger actually is
“Working as intended” - the dev who loves Privacy Badger.
Or maybe he feels that these seminars are for people who don’t use things like privacy badger.
It seems like you don’t need Training then (:
now I want to know what privacy badger is amd I’m too lazy to google it…
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We get fake phishing emails that are actually from IT and if we don’t recognize and report them, we get a talking-to. It’s a good way of keeping employees vigilant.
My last company did this. They’d also send out surveys and training from addresses I didn’t recognize, so I’d report those, too, only to be told they were legit 😂
Yeah this is a running joke at our workplace too. Only to be asked by some manager to do those week or few later
A friend (who actually works in IT) apparently has a good system at his company. It actually automates turning real phishing attempts into internal tests. It effectively replaces links etc and sends it onwards. If the user actually clicks through, their account is immediately locked. It requires them to contact IT to unlock it again, often accompanied by additional training.
Wait. So your friend’s company has the ability to reliably detect phishing attacks, but instead of just blocking them outright, it replaces the malicious phishing links with their own phishing links, sends those on to employees, and prevents them from doing their jobs of they fall for it?
Sounds like your friend’s company’s IT people are kind of dickheads
I work at a company that does something similar; it can be annoying to deal with these fake phishing emails from our own IT, but a 10-15 minute training session if you fail is a lot less disruptive than what can happen if you clicked the real link instead.
I consider myself a bit more tech-savvy than average, but I’ve almost fallen for a couple of these fake phishing emails. It helps me to keep up with what the latest versions of these attacks look like (and keeps me on my toes too…)
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Well the company probably can’t detect them reliably, so wih the ones it does detect it trains them to avoid the ones that they can’t detect.
I send supervisor emails about stuff I’m not gonna do to my spam folder as well…
“Did you get the email?”
“Nope, sorry, it looked a little suspicious so I didn’t open and sent it to spam…”
Basically you created a echo chamber at work where you can only hear what you want to hear
Lol I don’t click shit.
I always just ignore anything that looks dodgy, I can’t be bothered to spend the time reporting emails when I get so damn many that are either spam or phishing
No it isn’t.
Consider third-party vendor employees who have accounts at your workplace. They don’t know what the norms are, or the safe URLs. Half your employees in non-coding roles don’t know what the safe URLs are either. There’s so much internal SSO mess that just about anything could be a real redirect. Overengineered internal messy networks keep any of this from actually accomplishing its intended purpose of “teaching employees a lesson”.
I’m not sure what’s worse: that you’re teaching them to click on whatever they want because it’s impossible to tell the difference, or that you’re teaching them to click on nothing, which probably keeps them from doing their jobs.
Stop using email entirely and half of this goes away. Just tell them not to plug in USB drives.
But if they’re recognized it means they aren’t doing a good enough job faking them
Oh well, time to get better IT guys
That’s neat, will steal this.
(Opens DOS, frantically types)
“Heh. I was able to SSH right into their jpg with nothing but an Ethernet cable and router grease.”router grease
I don’t think that’s what you think it is sir carefully hides tissues
Nah, this isn’t cool. Fuck the company, but this will fuck over the users more than anyone.
If company does not give a crap about employee then they don’t about customer
I might care if they paid me a living wage.
I’m all for acting your wage, but I don’t want to make victims of anyone who is interacting with my company simply because I was feeling spiteful. The company will be fine, the tons of people who just had their information leaked are the ones who are truly inconvenienced and may face financial repercussions later on when their information is distributed. Just something to consider
A good portion of the movie Hackers was social engineering. That’s how Mitnick got into a lot of systems as well. Why search for vulnerabilities in apps when people are much easier to manipulate.
Loved that movie. That has been a fallback movie for so long now.
I wonder if that’s how my old job had 780 gb of source stolen though social engineering.
Pay people enough and this is less likely to happen.
As somone in IT who has to deal with executives I can assure you that high compensation has no correlation with good security practices :(
