Then I read the steps again, step 2 is "Type in 'Terminal'"... oh come on, will many people fall for that?
Also, I’d bet the average site owner does not know what a terminal is. Think small business owners. Plus the thought of losing revenue because their site is unusable injects a level of urgency which means they’re less likely to stop and think about what they’re doing.
There's no such thing as "too obvious" when it comes to computers, because normal people are trained by the entire industry, by every interaction, and by all of their experience to just treat computers as magic black boxes that you chant rituals to and sometimes they do what you want.
Even when the internet required a bit more effort to get on to, it was still trivial to get people to delete System32
The reality is that your CEO will fall for it.
I mean come on, do you not do internal phishing testing? You KNOW how many people fall for it.
Come to think of it... you are right! The barrier to entry was higher yet we fell for it! Err, I did fall for it when I was around 10 or something. :D
And it doesn't have to work on everyone, just enough people to be worth the effort to try.
Enough that it's still a valid tactic.
I've seen these on comporimsed wordpress sites a lot. Will copy the command to the clipboard and instruct the user to either open up PowerShell and paste it or just paste in the Win+R Run dialog.
These types of phishs have been around for a really long time.