You may get the impression from reports like Floppy Disk Hole in VMs (seriously) that serious coding skills are required to be a hacker.
Nothing could be further from the truth!
Sure, if you want to take over entire data centers, millions of VMs, take on the NSA in denial of service exchanges, ok, you are going to need some coding skills, not to mention some serious bandwidth and hardware.
If you lack those skills or resources, take heart from a recent Intel report on phishing that tested over 19,000 users from around the world.
Don’t be misled by headlines like: Intel Security’s Phishing Quiz Reveals 97 Per Cent of People Worldwide Cannot Identify Destructive Phishing Emails: “Make it a Rule to Never Click on Links or Attachments in Emails / Texts”. That is NOT what Intel reports.
The Intel post says:
Let’s take a look at the numbers:
- Of the 19,000 plus visitors from more than 140 countries, only 3% of test-takers identified every email correctly.
- Perhaps more importantly, 80% of those who took the quiz incorrectly identified least one phishing email. And unfortunately, one email is all it takes to fall victim to an attack.
- The worldwide average score was 65.4%, which means test takers missed one in four phishing emails on average.
The test had phishing and non-phishing emails. To be in the 3%, you needed to accurately identify phishing and non-phishing emails correctly. There is no danger from thinking a non-phishing email is phishing. The reverse is not true.
Take heart, 80% or 8 out of every 10 employees where you work will fall for phishing emails. Deep coding skills not required.
BTW, from the quiz post:
On average, industry insiders were only able to pick out two-thirds of the fakes. A slim six percent of quiz-takers got all the questions right, and 17 percent got half or more wrong. Remember, this is their job.
There may be a career for you in hacking via phishing. Remember, its an 80% shot for very little effort.
PS: Journalists/bloggers: It took five or six jumps to find the original Intel posts. Please include links to the original source of information in your posts.