this post was submitted on 27 Oct 2026
1500 points (98.6% liked)

Programmer Humor

33844 readers
974 users here now

Welcome to Programmer Humor!

This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!

For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.

Rules

founded 3 years ago
MODERATORS
 
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
[–] ExperimentalGuy@programming.dev 2 points 1 day ago (1 children)
[–] bisby@lemmy.world 4 points 1 day ago (1 children)

Apparently I'm both right and wrong.

At a previous job, there was a header. I can't remember it directly, but lets say it was like this:

X-Acme-Security-Test: Authorized simulated phishing exercise conducted by KnowBe4 on behalf of Acme Corp for security awareness training and compliance validation

Apparently KnowBe4 lets customers set their own custom headers. So this was probably set by my company. And not something everyone will see.

But also, they set an X-PHISHTEST header. Maybe its a signed header, so they can cryptographically prove the test was in accordance with the customer's request (this email was sent by us, but it uses YOUR private key, so clearly you were involved here, and we arent just scamming people, or otherwise allows you to validate it at the firewall/spam filter). This isn't the header I remember, but apparentlly can also be used to detect them -- the explicitly say not to do that, but here we are.

But if you ever get a knowbe4 phishing test, check the email headers. you'll probably find something to key off of.

[–] shroomato@lemmy.world 1 points 16 hours ago

Also there's a "congratulations you're a good boy" popup when you click the report phishing button in outlook, so I guess those headers is how the plugin determines whether this is a test email.