Belgian phishing expedition mistakenly hooks Thales
Belgian's Flemish government decided the time was ripe to educate its employees as to the dangers of opening up phishing scams in their work email. &nbsp;Essentially the exercise linked through to a scam confirmation of a high-speed train journey to Paris on Thales, and an overnight stay in a five star hotel for the gentle price of Euros 20,000 which would be debited to their credit cards within three days. &nbsp;Uproar Belgique ensued, but not quite where the programme's designers expected: for no-one had forewarned Thales that it would be central to the government exercise, hence its call-centres were not prepared and no-one knew what was going on.
An IT security drill went off the tracks in Belgium, prompting a regional government office to apologize to European high-speed train operator Thalys for involving it without warning.

Belgium’s Flemish regional government sent a mock phishing email to about 20,000 of its employees to see how they would react.

SLAPPED!

The email purported to be a booking confirmation from Thalys for a trip from Brussels to Paris, including a stay in a fancy hotel. The cost—almost €20,000 (about US$22,000)—would be charged to the recipient’s credit card unless the person cancelled within three days, the email said. To cancel the trip, the email instructed recipients to send their credit card information to Thalys, Belgian media reported.

Rather than hand over such information, though, government employees started calling Thalys to complain, to the bewilderment of its staff: The government had neglected to inform Thalys of the drill and nobody in the company’s call center knew what was going on.

Some government employees also reported the matter to the police.

Frank Geets, the Flemish government’s administrator-general for facility management, said the government went a bit off the rails by not informing Thalys of the drill.

“We made the mail as realistic as possible and used Thalys’ logo. But actually, we did not have their permission to do so,” Geets told Flemish news channel VTM, adding that the government has apologized to Thalys for “being a bit overzealous.”

While phishing attacks against staff are a perennial problem for large organizations, training to defend against them needs to be done with care and forethought. The Flemish government is not the first to discover this: An anti-phishing exercise by a U.S. Army commander went farcically wrong last year.