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.
Company I used to work for got hit fairly bad. Am email came in from the contract agency to the accounts payable clerk, personally addressed to her and signed off all informal like, to the effect of “hey Marion, our local bank branch is closing so we’ve had to move our accounts, can you update the IBAN to the following for me?”
€150,000 down a black hole, that wasn’t even noticed until a phone call came in a week later.
My favorite personal anecdote was when one of our security educators send an email explaining how he managed to click a phishing link, log in and then realize it was a fake website login.
Apparently he got an email telling him that the local scanner in the office had send him some material and he needed to authorize the transfer into his inbox by logging in.