Is there any fundamental reason your corporate email system couldn't, for example, just not interoperate with the rest of the Internet, at least by default? I understand if this doesn't work for people in sales or consulting or whatever, but 90-99% of my work email is entirely within the same company, and I think it would be less onerous and more secure to just block external email by default and use a separate, secured system when you had to email anyone outside the company.
A friend of mine works in industrial safety. He sees this a lot. He told me the rule "Jedes Verbot braucht ein Gebot", which roughly translated means "Every thing that is forbidden should be accompanied by a permission". So you can't just forbid people to smoke somewhere, you have to find a place where they can smoke. Otherwise they might find one themselves.
But how? They could only email with other people who also used their personal gmail for work—they couldn’t book conference rooms or look up anyone they hadn’t emailed before.
I suppose it depends on how we measure effectiveness. What was the false positive rate you observed in addition to the marked increase in reports of real phishing attempts? It would be interesting to see what impact the "blame and train" internal phishing has on overall company productivity compared to just not doing it.
I work at a small company, so I don't know if this is how any IRL organizations work, but it's how I assumed the procedure went.
At one of my previous jobs, there was this big part of intranet that was used by sysadmins, and various other people from fields other than software development. My team didn't have to deal with it, so we weren't even aware of it, much less had access to it. One day, however, someone wanted me to review a document from there. I bounced off the "Unauthorized" error, and dutifully followed the instructions to fill in an appropriate box with a justification, and send a request to be granted access.
The issue wasn't critical, so I didn't pester anyone about it, just patiently waited for the access, re-filing my request every other month. Many months later, with me still not getting access, I eventually brought this up to my boss, who then smiled and told me that this access request form literally goes to /dev/null. Apparently after some software migration, no one bothered to connect this to anything.
What's with https://h20195.www2.hpe.com/? Why?
I think it shouldn't be too hard to write an Outlook plugin to do this.
Imagine if someone from your benefits provider called and asked for your social security number or other PII for confirmation. Would you give it to them? I hope not. You should ask (as I always do) for their name and extension and tell them that you'll return their call through a published telephone number. Never once have I had someone balk at that, and I've done it countless times for many years.
For a link to a benefits provider, it's trivial to log into the portal through a known good domain and look around for whatever piece of information or news they were trying to communicate.
The hard issues come with all the random services HR contracts for stuff like harassment training, etc. If I can't corroborate a link myself then as a last resort I can simply ask HR (or w'ever department) directly, or as previously said just ignore it and wait for someone to say something.
At some point the usage of so many third-party services is just an insane security risk. It's almost comical when the corp security team runs a phishing test and on the same day you get a half-dozen e-mail messages from other departments with twice as many links to random domains. At some point you're just like, "fsck 'em" and have half a mind to not bother caring anymore. But it's not just their security on the line, it's yours, too.
I still use mutt for personal e-mail so maybe this is all easier for me. I've yet to become accustomed to hidden links or embedded multimedia in e-mail.
The kicker was when they told us that, if our mobile devices become more than a few years old, we just had to buy new ones in order to stay secure. I was flabbergasted. This is speaking about our own personal devices, not company-issued ones. Seriously, the gall to make people think the only way to be safe is to spend hundreds of dollars on new phones every 2 years.
It's just bizarre, and it's never been applicable in any of my workplaces. And I have worked for large, global law firms on quite famous litigation with huge international conglomerates as clients -- as a poorly paid grunt, not an associate, but that just meant I had more direct access to sensitive documents. I've probably received ~100 "phishy" emails over the years, and zero of them have been actual phishing attempts. Just more of that "the molesters are waiting around every corner and hiding behind every tree" nonsense, now migrated into the workplace.
Sure there is a lot of security theater but I think its important to understand that for attackers its definitely worth to spend a couple of hours on research. A successful email can quickly reach a 5 figures reward.
Source: I work in email security
As for the smartphone example: they could just have said to make sure you always have the most recent version of the OS, which is quite easy if you own a certain brand of smartphones, and can be frustratingly difficult if you use something else. I'm sorry to say but they were right: most vendors don't care for customers who have devices older than a few years because they don't bring them any money. It's a general problem in the industry, nothing surprisingly new.