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.
When these tests are conducted are they typically sent from an email with a non-company domain? I ask because a few months ago my partner received a test which she failed because it was sent from an email under her company’s normal domain name. I’m not in IT but I am in software dev and I thought this was pretty unreasonable, since in that scenario (AFAIK) either the company fucked up their email security or the attacker has control over the Exchange server in which case all bets are off anyway.
Usually a domain gets rented for the test, using the in-house domain isn’t normal. But you can change the display name of an email adress to appear as if it was sent from a reputable source
Do you mean something like “Legitimate Company hacker@malware.net”? In this case the company domain was in the actual sender address and not just the display name. Anyhow, ty for the insight!
All it takes is one email account to be compromised via spearphishing, and the attacker can send domain wide emails to everyone, with proper DKIM, SPF and all.