Reporting Resistance
- Being unsure is reason enough to report.
- A colleague reviewing it is not reporting it.
- Deciding whether it is real was never your job.
What this episode teaches
- Hesitation about reporting is not a knowledge gap, it is fear of being wrong, embarrassed, or wasting someone's time, and attackers count on it
- A contact-request message with no link and no attachment is a deliberate opening move, because once you answer, the real ask moves to a channel nobody is monitoring
- Checking with a coworker is not reporting, and trying to determine whether something is real is not your job
Two ways to read it
If you are the one watching
You already know you are supposed to report. The part that stops you is not knowledge, it is not wanting to be wrong, or to look foolish, or to waste someone's time. Attackers rely on exactly that pause. A message with no link and no attachment is not harmless, it is a test to see whether you answer, and once you do the real ask moves somewhere nobody is watching. Being unsure is reason enough to report, and deciding whether it is real was never your job.
If you run the program
Two things in this episode reverse advice that is still common. Checking with a colleague is where reports die, so an episode that says "ask around first" is training people into the gap rather than out of it. And a contact-request lure carries no payload on purpose, which means a program that measures only click rates never sees it. The metric that moves is time-to-report, not click rate, and it only moves if reporting a false alarm is genuinely costless in practice as well as in policy. If your process produces a follow-up that feels like an interrogation, the number will not move no matter what the training says.
Run the whole library
A new episode every month, captioned in 14 languages, ready to drop into your own LMS. Start a free trial and take the bundle with you.
Start a free trial