Finally blocked a phishing test at work after failing 3 times

My company does these fake phishing email tests every month and I kept falling for them. Last week I finally spotted one that looked like a Slack message asking me to reset my password. The big clue was the sender address had an extra letter in the domain name. I reported it to IT within 2 minutes and got a nice note from my boss. It felt good to finally catch one after feeling stupid for so long. Does your workplace do these tests and have you gotten better at spotting them over time?

2 comments

2 Comments

abby_singh11d agoMost Upvoted

ngl that's a solid win. honestly what helped me was slowing down and actually hovering over every link before clicking. i started looking at the email address more carefully too, those little misspellings are super easy to miss when you're rushing. once you train your brain to check those things first it becomes a habit, now i can spot sketchy stuff way faster than before.

quinn_carr11d ago

That first phishing test I failed at my last job had a fake email from "IT" with a link to what looked like our internal portal, but the URL had a zero instead of an O. I get that slowing down helps people like you, but I honestly think these tests just train us to be suspicious of everything, even legitimate messages from our own coworkers. It creates this constant anxiety that doesn't really help us deal with real threats, just makes us second guess every single email we get.