I’ve worked with a dude for years who I would consider smart both technically and non-technically. One time we got an email at work with an attachment that was something like “microsoft_update.exe.txt”. The email said “due to a technical limitation on the email system, this file needs to be renamed to drop the .txt and executed to apply a critical to your computer.”
It was, in my mind, such an obvious phishing attempt that I laughed out loud and said “who the fuck would ever fall for this?” Then my coworker popped his head over the cube wall and said “WAIT WHAT? We weren’t supposed to run that?!”
Fortunately, the security team sat nearby and heard the whole thing and rushed over to quarantine his PC
quarantine his PC
You mean shut it off and steal and the Ethernet cable? Lol
You DONT want to turn it off. Digital forensics work WAAAAAAY better if you have a memory dump of the system. And all the memory is lost if you turn it off. Even if the virus ran 10h ago and the program has long stoped running, there will most likely still be traces in the RAM. Like a hard drive, simply deleting something in RAM doesn’t mean it is gone. As long as that specific area was not written over later it will still hold the same contenta. You can sometimes find memory that belonged to a virus days or even weeks after the infection if the system was never shut down. There is so much information in ram that is lost when the power is turned off.
You want to 1: quarantine from network (don’t pull the cable at the system, but firewall it at the switch if possible) 2: take a full copy of the RAM 2.5: read out bitlocker keys if the drive is encrypted. 3: turn off and take a bitwise copy of the hard drive or just send the drive + memory dump to the forensics team. 4: get coffee
Even a smart person can have a bad day / moment of weakness. If you are super busy / stressed out and some email comes that looks like a bullshit request from HR or IT or whatever, it can be tempting to just try to knock it off your plate real quick so you can get back to whatever fire you were fighting.
My tactic these days is I pretty much don’t click on ANYTHING in an email, so it’s an ingrained habit. If it’s a link to something, it’s usually one I can navigate to myself using my browser. If it’s an attachment, we use a file sharing system that stores these so I can just go to that and see what’s in there.
It’s inconvenient, and you don’t always have these work-around options, but by trying to make into an automatic habit, it has saved me a couple of times.