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.
one of the primary tenets of IT is that end users do not read. they click things like crazy, even shit they shouldnt.
the bigger the company the worse this is because volume.
its almost always an attachment bomb, or a link to malicious packages on teh web.
I’m in somewhat of a leadership position in an agency. I feel like I should talk to those above me about having more training for my co-workers. This is a nightmare scenario.
the way we deal with this in my org is testing our own staff… we use a service that sends very well faked emails. They can look like they are from our own vendors/staff even… but they contain invalid links that an end user should know are not valid… these emails are technically ‘compromised’. when an end user clicks a link, they are informed they failed, and automatically enrolled in one of our mandatory security training classes. every time they click a bad link.
the best part is we silently rolled this out and something like 80% of c-levels failed. they were soooo pissed… but what could they do?
I’ve worked for places that do this, and I’ve seen the same people having to do the same training every time these emails went out. I feel like they never learned from it. They’d even get pissed that they had to keep retaking the training, but I feel like it never occurred to them that they should maybe change their own behavior.
we do have an HR component attached to this. if youre consistently under-performing you will eventually be fired. hipaa and all that.
keeping every user to minimum required access also helps a bit.
It always amazed me that she could just keep doing it and then go to the training, yeah. I feel like that was a glaring flaw in our system.
No hr component, no reason for her to take it seriously except for the annoyance of the training. Give her a little scare and maybe she doesn’t have to be terminated, or she’s just an idiot.
Unfortunately a lot of companies treat IT as an annoying afterthought, so it isn’t uncommon for there to be no real enforcement mechanism.
I don’t work there anymore, but there were a lot of other problems with that place, so it doesn’t exactly surprise me that there was no teeth in their policy
You have an office hippo that fires people?!?
That’s metal
I suspect the appropriate response is to revoke their email….
I mean, you know. If you could trust them to not go create a “mynamemycompany@evenworsethangmaildotcom”
The problem is a big portion of their work relied on email
Sounds like they’re not qualified :)
(I’ll just leave that to somebody else,)
Wish you could get our IT to make ours good fakes instead of coming from “whatever@cityname.securitytrainingcompany.blog.com” or some shit. It feels like they’re not even trying. Although I do work with one of the single dumbest people I’ve ever met, so maybe that’s to give her the teeeeniest chance at identifying it.
Then again, targeting the first wave of training to the low hanging fruit who fall for such obvious scams is a good place to start.
If you want more information on what your company can do to help protect against ransomware, CISA’s stop ransomware site has good advice:
https://www.cisa.gov/stopransomware
You should have max the plain text to cisa but the actual URL to a failed phishing website. Lol
This is great, thanks!
Sometimes because we’ve conditioned them to.
Confirm dialogs are a perfect example of UI intertia.
You hit confirm on a close dialog so many times that it doesn’t matter what it says. By the time you’ve registered what it is muscle memory has done it’s thing