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.
It always amazed me that she could just keep doing it and then go to the training, yeah. I feel like that was a glaring flaw in our system.
No hr component, no reason for her to take it seriously except for the annoyance of the training. Give her a little scare and maybe she doesn’t have to be terminated, or she’s just an idiot.
Unfortunately a lot of companies treat IT as an annoying afterthought, so it isn’t uncommon for there to be no real enforcement mechanism.
I don’t work there anymore, but there were a lot of other problems with that place, so it doesn’t exactly surprise me that there was no teeth in their policy