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.
My former employer did this (might have contracted with a similar company). The emails were really convincing, but I don’t think most of us ever clicked them, though I remember other staff asking me if I thought it was a phishing email. I’d ask them what made them think that it was phishing so they’d learn. The last thing I wanted on top of everything else was the hassle that would come if our network got compromised, because we worked with so much private and sensitive client data.
But there was one co-worker who I’ve mentioned elsewhere in this thread who would click on something in the message almost every time. She took the mandatory training so many times, but it never stuck for some reason. I was always amazed she kept her job.
Yeah, I don’t think too many people click on those “educational” phishing emails but it does happen once in a while. We have a slack channel where people can contact the security team and I do regularly see people asking about suspicious emails. They never admit if they’re test emails but always thank folks for reporting them.
It was a little bit different at my employer. If we correctly reported something as phishing, if it was a test, we’d get a message back saying that we correctly identified the message along with more tips about identifying phishing.