Why does nobody talk about the human side of phishing tests at work?

I work at a mid sized company in Austin and our IT guy sent out a fake phishing email last month. One of our older coworkers actually clicked it and reported it to him personally saying 'hey is this legit?' The IT guy basically laughed at him in front of everyone. Now the guy feels stupid and tells me he won't report anything again cause he doesn't want to look dumb. Doesn't that defeat the whole purpose of training people? If we shame folks for being cautious how are they supposed to learn? Has anyone else seen this backfire at their job?

2 comments

2 Comments

finleyl5525d ago

Ugh, that's such a classic IT move. It's like the whole point of those tests is to catch people being dumb instead of actually helping them. It's the same pattern you see everywhere, like when a cashier rolls their eyes at you for asking a question about a coupon. People are so quick to judge instead of remembering what it's like to not know something. Your coworker will probably just delete every email now, including the real ones, cause nobody wants to be the office joke.

finley_wells6625d ago

500 emails later, he'll just hit "select all" and call it a day.