Snapchat Employee Data Leaks Out Following Phishing Attack

I do work for some higher ed institutions, and almost every year without fail we have seen (and dealt with) successful phish attempts of various staff members... it's usually something small like a credit card number, but it still amazes me how an email that may look "very suspicious" to me doesn't set of a flag for someone else who isn't really thinking about this type of attack.

> In the scam, a criminal mimics a chief executive’s email account and directs an employee to wire money to an overseas bank account. By the time the company realises it has been duped, the money is gone.

> [This scam] has cost businesses around the globe more than $2bn in little over two years, according to the US Federal Bureau of Investigation," with more than 12,000 victims, some of which "have been tricked into sending as much as $90m to offshore accounts."

http://www.ft.com/intl/cms/s/0/83b4e9be-db16-11e5-a72f-1e774...

The most effective part of our program is the internal phishing attempts. They aren't annually or quarterly but almost monthly and sometimes weekly. It works very, very well and keeps phishing at the top of everyone's mind. There is nothing quite like teaching someone how easy it is to be caught off guard by showing them how easily someone can be phished and how they took the bait. It disarms them and the ego part of the conversation. It makes it a psychologically safe element of the corporate culture. It changes the conversation from "You're a dummy <3 SecOps" to "It can happen to anybody. In fact it's happened to a number of important and very smart people here. Stop, Look and Think before you click or fill out that form or send that file/information."

It's an interesting part of our security awareness program. In fact, we've built out a small application that sends the phishing email with a remote <img /> to track the email view(see the bait).

We then track them hitting the link through a unique URL (taking the bait), and track the final push of a login button or web-form (swallowing the hook entirely.)

It allows us to track how effective the campaign is and understand who may need some remedial training and of course how we can better improve the security awareness training because if a high percentage take the bait, the security awareness training wasn't effective.

In fact, I sent this article around the office this afternoon and sometime mid-week, plan to send another phishing attempt to see if it helped.

This strategy of course requires an organization to be fairly emotionally intelligent and have the right corporate culture. One of trust and transparency in a psychologically safe environment where people aren't mocked or made fun of but properly educated if they take the bait. I know that this kind of culture may not be the norm.

NOTE: We don't have as much to secure as a SnapChat and we aren't a high profile target. We just figured these things were the bare-minimum things to do to protect our employees and our customers.

The scammers asked for W2 tax forms. They use this to collect your refund. This has happened to dozens of startups in LA, among other businesses, ironically the ones which have HR departments.

Do you think you'd think twice before responding to a mail from your manager asking for information that they had reason to ask for? Would you challenge them to verify themselves over the phone at 11:00 PM, just to be sure no one spoofed their email address?

I bet I wouldn't, and I'm paranoid.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2016/02/phishers-spoof-ceo-reque...

Shameless plug - if anyone is in need of an open source phishing training solution, I recently launched gophish to great feedback so far, and have a new version being dropped early next week: https://getgophish.com.

Everyone should have access to training to prevent this as much as possible.

Minor rant: The 401(k) provider regularly sends a plaintext deposit confirmation email (deposit amount, confirmation number) with each payroll cycle. Any time a change in contribution amount is changed, they send a plaintext email with the new contribution percentage. Occasionally they send plaintext statements containing dividend amounts.

When asked to stop sending these e-mails, the 401(k) administrator replied that it wasn't possible, supposedly due to the way they integrate with they integrate with a 3rd party mail provider. (what?)

Its much easier to teach people to access their emails using a particullar application then it is to make them aware for phising attacks which sometimes can be very sophisticated.

While this does not work if you have to receive emails from unknowns, it is a no brainer to use something like this at a comapny level for all online communication. In my opinion not doing so is really careless behaviour especially for a tech company...