Phishing Tests Are Getting Downright Mean

WSJ Tech News Briefing

The Wall Street Journal

Tech News, News

4.3 • 1.7K Ratings

🗓️ 10 February 2025

⏱️ 11 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Phishing scams are growing increasingly sophisticated, and IT departments seeking to help people outfox them are throwing sensational test traps at their employees and students. But as WSJ reporter Robert McMillan says, some of those who fall for them say the tests have gone too far (“free football tickets, anyone?”). Plus, AI reporter Belle Lin on how big tech wants to solve AI’s hallucinations using hard math. Sign up for the WSJ's free Technology newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:33.9	Welcome to Tech News Briefing. It's Monday, February 10th. I'm Pierre Bienname for the Wall Street Journal.
0:40.1	How useful can artificial intelligence really be if it sometimes makes stuff up?
0:45.0	Amazon is turning to so-called automated reasoning to cut down on hallucinations.
0:50.2	And IT departments routinely try to fool their employees in order to get them to recognize
0:55.2	hackers' fishing attempts. And some say they've gone a little too far.
1:03.0	Hackers who engage in fishing, sending deceptive emails aimed at stealing sensitive information,
1:08.8	are cooking up some increasingly sophisticated scams.
1:12.2	As a result, IT departments at companies and universities are throwing sensational tests at their
1:17.1	employees and students. The idea is, if you opened this email and clicked on the link,
1:22.4	you've failed the test. And failure comes at a cost. Fishing, spelled with a pH, was the first step in about
1:29.5	14% of cyber attacks last year. That's according to an analysis of data breaches done by Verizon.
1:35.9	Bob McMillan writes about computer security for the Wall Street Journal, and he reported on the
1:40.3	value of these test traps. So, Bob, how does fishing typically work? Well, they try to play in your
1:47.5	mind. They try to get you in some kind of panic mode. So usually what happens with these fishing emails
1:53.5	is there's some very, very important piece of information. They promise like your vacation days
2:00.2	are being cut. And you're like, what, my vacation
2:02.5	days are being cut? You click on the link. Then you have to log in. You don't even realize you're not
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