It’s really hard to defend against the human angle. I’ve seen senior management wire $1mil+ to a scammer by emailing the wire info, including PIN. 🤦♂️
Yes, this is human failure and it’s also human to fail.
Principally, this can work on any OS with gullible users. I blame Microsoft-Entreprise-IT partly because it’s an easy target and partly because dumb users are their fault due the multiple layers of obfuscation built into the products/setups.
If you have a Google password and an Apple password, they are clearly both vulnerable to phishing attacks. But you would never use any of those with Amazon because clearly you learned the use unique passwords. Also, how often do Google or Apple ask for your password? Maybe, once when you setup a device, are once per day (if you have your sessions expire). Reasonable. Not the most secure setup, we can do better than passwords, but most people somehow manage.
Now enter corporate IT. Here we have “password sync” (shudder). Here we have Azure AD / Entra ID / M365, which are okay products, deployed in companies that never wanted anything in the cloud. Now you get emails from “Word” asking for your most important password. Depending on the configuration, you may be constantly nagged by 2FA requests.
Also, no one explains anything the the users, including the CEO. The “new” Windows and office just appeared. People startet entering passwords in places that never needed a password before.
Short version:
That’s it. All the analysis about how they inject some code into some browser and communicate with their server is a smoke screen.
Our most favourite OS is blatantly insecure.
Mac browser too apparently.
It’s really hard to defend against the human angle. I’ve seen senior management wire $1mil+ to a scammer by emailing the wire info, including PIN. 🤦♂️
Yes, this is human failure and it’s also human to fail.
Principally, this can work on any OS with gullible users. I blame Microsoft-Entreprise-IT partly because it’s an easy target and partly because dumb users are their fault due the multiple layers of obfuscation built into the products/setups.
If you have a Google password and an Apple password, they are clearly both vulnerable to phishing attacks. But you would never use any of those with Amazon because clearly you learned the use unique passwords. Also, how often do Google or Apple ask for your password? Maybe, once when you setup a device, are once per day (if you have your sessions expire). Reasonable. Not the most secure setup, we can do better than passwords, but most people somehow manage.
Now enter corporate IT. Here we have “password sync” (shudder). Here we have Azure AD / Entra ID / M365, which are okay products, deployed in companies that never wanted anything in the cloud. Now you get emails from “Word” asking for your most important password. Depending on the configuration, you may be constantly nagged by 2FA requests.
Also, no one explains anything the the users, including the CEO. The “new” Windows and office just appeared. People startet entering passwords in places that never needed a password before.
This makes phishing effective.