<s>[INST] I found a study about phishing attacks where a set of emails were sent out to employees at various companies with email addresses laid out as "first.lastname@company.com" and "firstinitial.lastname@company.com", and the study found that clicks rates went up when the attackers used the format "firstinitial.lastname@company.com". They took into consideration things like message content and sender profile but still found that people were less likely to be cautious when the sender email looked like their company email, but just in the firstinitial.lastname format.

They found that this worked so well because people were mistakenly assuming the email was from someone in their company.

I think this has a lot of implications for companies that have multiple email formats for their employees. If they had previously only used the first.lastname format but then moved to using firstinitial.lastname format for new employees, they would still be vulnerable to this phishing attack even if they trained their employees to be suspicious of emails that weren't in their company's format. 

You summarized well, but I thought one part of this was wrong. You said that the attackers were less likely to be cautious because the sender email looked like their company's but just in firstinitial.lastname format. Actually it was the attackers who were assumed to be co-workers by the employees because of the assumed proprietary email address format.

It was actually the employees who weren't as cautious, not the attackers ((Utilizing made-up phrases to figure out what is happening in text). And yes, they called it format phishing.

You're not even supposed to know the term "format phishing" yet. And yeah, it appears that as time passes and a company's email formats change, the susceptibility to format phishing attacks remains. 

Thank you for the correction. Yes that is what happened the term is indeed "format phishing." Yes, this attack exploits the tendency of employees to let their guard down when they perceive the email as internal, based on the email address format. I also see that I actually correctly understood the key finding of the study that the emails were clicked more when the attackers used the format firstinitial.lastname@company.com.

So it appears that format phishing attacks can remain effective despite any company attempts to educate employees on being cautious with unfamiliar emails. Companies will need to continually adapt their employee training to take into account their changing email formats to remain safe.

And yes, I do know that part of the study had something to do with "very convincing" internet trolls.

Do you mean "very convincing" sender profiles?[/INST]