If a single click on a phishing email can ruin the entire company, the blame doesn’t lie with that individual.
That individual ABSOLUTELY has a piece of the blame.
Clicking a link isn’t supposed to have side effects, if it does someone else fucked up.
In my time as a cybersecurity professional, my approach is always to blame the system, not the person.
If they clicked on a phishing link: 1) that email should never have reached their inbox, 2) that link should never have loaded, and 3) our awareness training is not up to snuff.
We have test-phishing mails sent by our IT-Sec team on a regular basis. There’s usually an obvious one and a better made one. First round 10% clicked the obv. one, 99% the good one.
We had a lot of trainings after that.
Last year the numbers went down to 5% and 80%.
If your security concept relies on both of these numbers being zero, you’re an incompetent hack trying to shift the blame on end users instead of doing your job.
I’m so excited to see unpopular opinion puffin! 😁🎊🎉✨
Maybe not finacilly or legally but image wise it can. Depending on the company and the people involved a company can 100% loose a lot image wise and in consequence, money wise
“As an engineer, I reserve the right to click on the fake phishing emails from IT, just to see what they do.”
My boss: “…god dammit.”
There are very few one click total compromises out there.
Most of the time clicking on the link will get to a phishing page to harvest credentials or prompt to download a zip or pdf which has the actual malware exploit/payload.
True, in many cases there is a whole chain of vulnerabilities and misconfigurations, and everything starts with one phishing mail. For example:
- successful phishing
- VPN without 2FA, allowing the attacker access to company services
- internal services with vulnerabilities, allowing the attacker to compromise a server
- permission misconfiguration, allowing lateral movement
That was the point of this meme. It is not phishing alone that gets the company in trouble, its mostly a series of misconfigurations.
I think that in cyber security, we have to assume that phishing will be successful sometimes - and be prepared when it happens.
