Last Monday, VU Amsterdam sent out a phishing mail to check how many people would take the bait. Well, it worked.

The subject was ‘Vuamsterdam’, and it came from maryvanden.broek[at]personeel-survey.nl. This was the email:

Hi,

As discussed, please see attached a copy of your documents, please can you sign and scan these back to me as soon as possible? Download from Microsoft Onedrive:

[link]

Please let me know if you have any questions.

Kind regards,

Mary

Who would fall for that, would you think? Well, the results are fairly disappointing. “The email was sent to 46,000 people. More than 1,300 employees and about 6,300 students clicked on the link. We’ve got our work cut out for us”, says chief information security officer Coen Wartenhorst op VUnet.