ComputerWorld

This company is the target of a spear-phishing attack, but it doesn’t actually get very far, according to an IT pilot fish working there.

“It was the typical ‘CEO is out of the office and needs a wire transfer done right away’ message,” fish says.

“Our people are pretty good at spotting phishing attempts, and our administrative assistant was immediately suspicious because we do wire transfers approximately never. She strung the guy along over multiple emails and got all the transfer information — amount, routing number, account number and so on.

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Pilot fish’s workplace is upgrading to use smart cards, but he’s not thinking about that when he sees a pop-up about an update — one that strikes fish as a little, um, fishy.

“I thought, if something like that was to occur and need user intervention, IT would have sent a notice out about it,” says fish.

“So a screen shot and email went off to IT security. They responded much faster than I expected, and in person: There was something wrong and they needed my laptop hard drives ASAP.”

Fish turns over his machine, and the next day he receives replacement hard drives. But it turns out his backup wasn’t configured for all the folders and file types he stores data in — and now he’s missing about a terabyte of data.

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