Phishing E-mail campaigns continue to Trick USPS Employees

According to one federal watchdog, employees at the U.S. Postal Service (USPS) keep on getting duped with malware-laced phishing e-mails almost 12 months following a hacker publishing on the Internet over 800,000 workers' personal information, published dailycaller.com, October 7, 2015.

According to Inspector General of the watchdog, the USPS employees couldn't successfully pass a test for detecting as well as reporting phishing electronic mails referred to as fraudulent e-mails carrying harmful digital viruses, possibly because they didn't have appropriate cyber-security training. Dailycaller.com published this.

The IG stated that USPS' information security awareness in connection with phishing wasn't properly done. Workers who were trained saw one video on the way users required performing a right-click followed with hitting on delete to erase phishing e-mails, however, the video didn't show the way for detecting and reporting the messages.

During the test, investigators dispatched one fraudulent phishing e-mail to 3,125 employees of USPS out of which merely 7% reported the e-mails as per the Postal Service needs.

About 25% of the phishing e-mail receivers hit the given web-link that possibly would've compromised the computer network of USPS had the phishing message been really so.

Merely 139 of the workers put to test went through the full yearly cyber-training at USPS.

The IG tells that USPS, an enormously scaled corporate e-mail system, handles 3.5m e-mails daily from 200,000 electronic mail accounts. Nextgov.com reported this, October 7, 2015.

According to the report, the majority respondents within the latest phishing test, some 96%, hadn't fully finished the yearly awareness training on information security.

USPS officials stated that just when one fresh cyber-security training session was begun, the evaluation too was started. Additionally they stated that there was a 25% click-rate which was equivalent to organizations' benchmarks barely starting their training. The latest curriculum concentrated on the way for recognizing phishing traps.

The audit revealed inspectors seizing reactions to the test phishing messages between May 27 and June 4.

Chief Information Security Officer Greg Crabb of USPS said that the postal service admitted that yearly security awareness program that consisted of phishing awareness program was extremely vital for the company. Nextgov.com reported this.

» SPAMfighter News - 10/13/2015