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.
Facility management nowadays is outsourced to third party agencies. Usually the pay and working times are shit and they are consistently understaffed. At the same time they usually get access to most regular offices and they work before or after the offices fill.
For a more concerted effort finding out which companies clean at which offices and enrolling there is not much of a thing. And voila you get access to all physical computers, can plant key loggers or other tools, or just malicious USB Sticks or similiar on the site.
Not in the context of IT security, but for instance in Berlin Germany a group of robbers that stole the 100 kg gold maple leaf coin, hired someone a few month earlier with the security guard agency of the museum it was presented at.
Oh, I see! So they could literally pay a member of the cleaning staff to install such a thing. I hadn’t even considered this!
Or just get the job yourself.
Most cleaning crews aren’t as rigorously checked as r&d even though they have more physical access than r&d