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Comment by mandatory | Hacker News Reader

> The real story here is Twitter's lack of spear-phishing training for their support staff, not support employees have access to support tools.

Spear-phishing by its very definition is a highly targeted attack. I wouldn't count on any level of training to prevent someone from getting phished. Given some of the spear phishing campaigns I've seen, I wouldn't trust even myself not to fall for them.

It's a problem that needs to be solved with technical solutions like hardware U2F, locked-down customer support devices (e.g. Chrome enterprise policy managed ChromeOS devices), and special account VIP/anomaly locking and auto-escalation.

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FWIW, this is actually quantifiable. We contract with a firm that tests employees' response to spear phishing about once a quarter with varying degrees of "difficulty". Part of an overall scheme that also identifies people who blindly click on things for, uh, further email education.

I'd love to know if you have any data to show if that "further email education" makes any difference in future behaviour...

The cynic in me reckons "Hell no! Those sorts of people are way too often _proud_ of their zero-thought blind clicking and lack of understanding of how things work"...

It's very easy to avoid being spear phished: do not trust any unsolicited message over any medium. Email/text/phone message/popup window purporting to be from your registrar with an urgent call to action? Ignore said call and contact them directly via known good number, email address, URL, etc.

EDIT: Voice mimicry scam? Verify via known channel before taking action.

The question isn't how you and I can individually avoid being spear phished, but what policies can be implemented across an organization to prevent it. Even the most trusted security teams aren't going to be allowed to summarily fire everyone who fails the test.

I also think this is a much stricter standard than you're recognizing. In my company's last spearphishing test, they sent out a link purporting to be a company survey immediately after an all-hands meeting announcing there'd be a survey (the real survey link came a few hours later). Expecting that nobody will be distracted enough to fall for such a thing seems unrealistic no matter how well you train them.

Just wondering if employees failed the test just by clicking on the link or if they had to actually enter some passwords or confidential information on the fake survey site. I wouldn't think clicking a link then looking at the address bar and seeing the domain name is wrong, then closing the page would be a problem, would it?

We got judged on both. Most security teams in my experience feel that even clicking on the link is a big risk, although I've never read a more detailed explanation of why than "oh there might be a 0-day".

I've seen that. It was funny.

The corporate security team sent out the email. It had a link with no actual content, giving an error, but that got you on the list of people with bad security behavior.

The trouble at my office was that most employees were highly capable security researchers. These are people who reverse engineer malware for pay and for fun. Of course they eagerly attempted to download from the link! They wanted fresh new malware. People would typically download via wget in a virtual machine on a PC without important data.

Jeez, what's next, seeing how the NOC handles a (fake) hostage situation?

Disable links in emails by default goes a long way.

How would this work? I get emails like "you have been added to <link> gerrit review" and "<link> Redmine issue was updated" several time a day and I need to open these links.

The links become text and you would copy and paste. That's how thunderbird does it.

Maybe on individual level but on organisation level it's one of the biggest current attack vectors.

And there is no magic bullet. Trying to educate people gives some results, but mostly just prevents low effort phishing attack.

I have never seen pentest that include social engineering fail. (This might be just our customers. I would expect govt or infrastructure organization to be better)

That's exactly it. If it is inbound you can't trust it.

It’s only going to get worse. Imagine your boss calling you and telling you to provide him some info: https://www.wsj.com/articles/fraudsters-use-ai-to-mimic-ceos...

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