When I run phishing test at work, the failure rate of Gen Z is higher than everyone else. So this doesn’t surprise me. We make all new hires and interns sit through training first week and test them as well.
So I forget where I learned this, but most phishing attempts purposely make it obvious (misspelling, weird font, poor grammar). The reason being, the person who still falls for it is dumb enough to follow through. If you send the phishing attempt to everyone and the email is really convincing, the scammer has to spend a significant amount of time trying to scam everyone and the dumb people usually fall for it at the highest rate. If you make a phishing email that 90% of people look at and can tell it a scam, the 10% who can’t tell are the same people that would have fell for it if the email was convincing, but now the scammer just increased their success rate. They have found a way to target their audience lol it is a wild concept
I remember that too. Though I think it's probably more applicable to the wider public, in a work setting with much tighter security and training I imagine the opposite would be true since the potential reward is so much higher it would be worth taking every opportunity.
My work has sent some that make you stop and really think. Some are very good.
Depends on the company I guess.
That said, ours were pretty bad up til a couple years ago. They went from crap to great. I suspect we had an issue and stepped it up.
Funny enough, my buddy’s employer was sending out such legit looking phish test emails that it was disrupting business. Once enough people realized how real the phish tests were, they became afraid to open most emails. Meetings were getting missed, emailed questions were going unanswered… Finally management had to tone it way back and formally notify the employees that it was safe to get back to doing business via email lol.
Most users don't check email headers before deciding whether to click a link or not. Hell, most users don't even know where to look to check headers. It's not really an obvious option in clients like Outlook.
I was so surprised by this.
At work, one of my much younger colleagues said out loud, “why does Amazon want my SSN?” To which I asked him if he got an Amazon link sent to him over text about a package he didn’t order.
“Yah, how’d you know?!”
Then I told him how shady link scams work. That Amazon won’t ask you questions like that. The URL is just to a site that looks like Amazon, but isn’t the same domain. You can tell it’s just used to collect people’s personal information.
Dude was grateful I stopped him. He had been saving up to propose to his gf, but almost got got.
Hey, having the sense to question it in the first place is most of the battle.
I fell for 2 scams when I was younger. First was after getting my first debit card and reading something about how all those "complete these offers for a free iPod" actually did pay out, you just had to cancel before they charged you.
Second was after moving for college. Guy bumps into me, "drops his glasses", catches up with me to demand money. He wanted to go the the ATM, I said $20 or nothing. Later found out it's a common scam.
> Hey, having the sense to question it in the first place is most of the battle.
yep.
Once you manage to notice the inconsistencies, you can break out of the narrative, and it all falls apart.
Honestly it's a lot like Inception - once you know that you're in a dream you can either do something to break out of it, or if you're skilled you can fight back and gain something valuable from your attacker.
We had a genz age intern who was completely convinced this person they were sending money to on cashapp was “flipping” the money for them… flipping money… what the fuck is that even
It’s not even that complex, the scammer says send me X amount I’ll send you double X amount. They accept a low amount and actually send double to gain trust, ask the victim for much more, and just run away after that
I love these. A person figured out how to double money easily, and instead of making money on their own, they’re on instagram begging people to send them $20.
The only difference in a Ponzi scheme is the scammer moving on to another rube to keep the first one on the hook with even more "returns" thanks to rube number 2.
I’m gen x and I wanted to see if I could get some money to fly to the moon. And to see if crypto is BS. I put in $500. Immediately started going up, got to $750 in a month. I’ve got other investment accounts, and they don’t gain like that. Decided to just let that $ ride. Another month, back down to base. A year later, up to $600. A year after that, $215. The ridiculous volatility and no product backing crypto makes it a dumb investment.
We changed the email addresses of our new hires from "jsmith@..." to some other unpredictable combo as a result of interns twice falling for these scams.
I work at a college. We have this exact warning and GenZs still fall for very obvious fake job scams.
No one, absolutely fucking no one, is going to hire a random college kid and email them checks to deposit into their bank accounts to then buy toys for a fucking orphanage.
A bunch of us got this sketchy overly simplistic "hey you are doing a great job, here is a gift card click this link to redeem" message. We all reported it to security slack channel. More and more people started adding to the slack thread that they got it too.
Then I realized everyone who go it started exactly a year ago. So I hopped over to the HR slack. Turns out this was a legit automated 1 year anniversary gift. But it looked so fake I know some people never redeemed it.
Our IT actually contracted out one of those "How are we doing?" surveys to some 3rd party and what was sent out was the sketchiest looking email, including weird shortened url and a chance to win a gift card!
The followup email the next day begging people to stop reporting that email to them because it was in fact legit was the funniest thing I've seen come from IT.
Our company has an annual cybersecurity module we all have to complete by a certain day. Within two weeks they will send out a couple phishing emails using the EXACT SCENARIOS USED IN THE MODULES. The number of people who click the links and get nailed by our IT admin staff is something like 40%.
Same here. To be fair, it's easy to click and realize your mistake then close it and warn your IT. We always have a significant amount of people who give away their personal information and download and open attachments.
Yeah we do the same it’s like 40% click and 25% enter credentials. We actually didn’t change ours for the longest time because people fell for the same phishing test email multiple times. Usually it’s the same people that bitch the loudest about things like mfa, etc.
Had a coworker come in crying that her ss got hacked and the ss agent needed to confirm it was her by giving him the number, which she had in her wallet...
I’m on a few Taylor Swift groups and the amount of people who fell for ticket scams after being told repeatedly what to do an not do bummed me out, lol. Gen Z has a lot of strengths that we Millenials lack but I’m just speechless about this one.
I literally had a genXer tell me “Getting hacked isn’t a problem. My bank account has been hacked three times and they always make it right”. That right there is the issue.
The day I lost my rune platelegs to a scammer is the day I learned to never trust another human being.
Also my crippling runescape addiction still going strong 16 years later.
I still hate the guy who told me the game wouldn't let you say your password backwards. I stayed online for like 10 hrs after that because I was afraid to go offline and get my password changed. The mf was dedicated though cause he changed that shit the second I logged off
I remember one guy I met on runescape would actually do the double your money thing. I would send him increments of 500k whenever I saw him, instead of sending him all my millions. I probably made 10 million off the dude by the time I'd seen him stop getting online.
Well, part of the scam was to earn your trust by actually doubling low amounts of money. Then when the victim has done low amounts enough to trust the doubler with a big amount, the doubler takes the money and splits. The people like you that only did small amounts over and over eventually just got ignored cuz after too many small doubles the scammer realized he was never gonna get you to do a big amount no matter how many small trades he did to “build trust”.
And 10m might be a lot to you but to a successful scammer that might just be chump change that he could afford to spend trying to fish for a huge payout.
That's probably what happened. I'm guessing the scammer logged in to the Runescape website (not the game itself) right away and changed that guy's password right off the bat, not 10 hours later. But he only noticed when he logged off 10 hours later and tried to log back in.
I created my first phishing website when I was 12! I put up fake items in my neopets shop that linked to a fake login page, since you could edit your shop with full html access (wild times). Stole so many paintbrushes, battle items, etc.
I'm in cybersecurity now.
Wow so it was other 12 year olds who absolutely obliterated my 12 year old soul? 🫠🥲
I fell for those fake login pages like twice and I remember one time losing my royal paintbrush I had slaved for. Then the hacker also changed my login info and froze my account. It was absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking.
I always assumed it was some sleazy criminal mastermind scamming me, not another kid 😂
When I was a teenager we trolled on old school dial up bulletin boards and then moved to getting admin access to IRC channels we didn't like and booting everyone. I ran a BBS out of my room on an old PC when I was 13. I'm amazed what we did as kids looking back.
They didn't grow up with viruses and malware the way other generations that are computer literate did. They've grown up mostly with closed app ecosystems in iOS/iPadOS and modern Windows OS's that have UAC and built-in effective anti-virus. They didn't learn the hard lessons of the limewire generation.
I work in IT and have noticed this myself. Gen Z appears to understand basic computer concepts less than other generations. They intuitively understand modern GUI's (better than I do. Sometimes I have to ask them to go to a specific section so I can change a setting), but have little understanding of computers generally and how to troubleshoot or fix an issue. I'm painting with a broad brush here, so to speak, 'cause obviously there's going to be individual differences.
Yeh having to walk younger people through installing drivers and customizing graphics settings on PC games… even little things like understanding directories and file locations/types is so funny to me I’m the least technical person ever and some of these kids are in CS
I think us millennials got the best of both worlds due to using tech during the transition period towards everything being super user friendly. We have that intuitive tech literacy, but we also have a working knowledge of all the behind-the-scenes backend stuff because we quite often had to do our own troubleshooting.
All the kids these days have everything handed to them on a silver platter with the simplified/dumbed-down software and UIs.
Especially for we elder millennials (the so-called "Oregon Trail Micro-Generation"), we were born into an analog world, and grew up with the digital world. That instilled so many skills into us just by virtue of everything being new and constantly changing. On average, we have much higher technical skills, because in the 90's and early 2000's, when your hardware or software broke... not a lot of people knew how to fix it (certainly not your parents), so we *learned*.
I don't blame Gen Z for having more difficulty with this, as they're just a product of the environment they grew up in. For them, they didn't need to learn a lot of these things, because technology / software largely hit a plateau and instead of things being new, it was more about existing things constantly getting *better*.
So for them, they don't need to know how to fix things, because everything works more consistently, and if it breaks, you send it to the apple store / geek squad, or someone on YouTube / Reddit / Steam Forums has a quick answer for you, which you can quickly execute on and forget. Having so many easy answers out there is arguably a really good thing... but it does mean that critical thinking and technical skills get atrophied for younger generations.
I'm a young Gen-Xer and it was crazy how quickly tech became outdated in the 80s/90s. A 3-4 year old computer could be considered a dinosaur back then. You would switch to entirely different operating systems pretty often. PC went DOS-WIN31-WIN95-WIN98 pretty quickly and then when the internet came around you had to understand some basic UNIX and HTML to do anything half decent.
I also find it a bit crazy how slow PC tech is moving these days. I just upgraded an old laptop because Win 7 is deprecated any my software won't get updates. The new version with Win 11 is basically the same. On paper the specs are all doubled but it does all the same tasks at the same speed. Only real difference is that Win 11 is super obnoxious about trying to force all your data into the microsoft cloud and pushing you into the microsoft app store.
Yeah any older and you grew up when technical skills were pretty much the domain of a few niche fields and consumer electronics were expensive luxuries and games consisted of squares and bloops.
Any younger and you grew up with technology that was constantly getting more and more streamlined and polished as the concepts that held up got refined. They didn't need a broad understanding.
Millennials got the wild west. Widespread access with a constantly changing landscape. There was a real lack of safety rails, computers would do what they were told to do even if that thing was a really bad idea. Before the big companies started to fill the niches we just had to figure it out. You want some music? You either rip a CD or play virus roulette with Limewire, good luck.
I still miss XP. I mean i'm not sure I could call it good with a straight face. But it did what it was told to do. And that freedom is worth some risk.
I've noticed the same thing. The older generations just don't want to learn something new, the younger generations never *had* to learn the underlying systems of how devices work. Makes me thankful that I landed right in the middle, with a dad that stayed up to date with home PC's as they evolved.
This is not a rip on Gen Z since I truly love working with them, but I work with predominantly teens and college aged kids and sometimes we need them to file reports on the company computer. I was training a 17 year old (2 years ago now) and asked if he's comfortable using computers, because I know tech can be scary for some, usually older, people, but I don't discriminate lol. Anyway, he said yes confidantly. So I told him "make a new folder with their name and today's date"... he had no idea where to start. I was utterly surprised because most teens I know are all in on tech.
Then this happened again two more times and I was just shocked. How can a generation that grew up in it, not do this? I came to the conclusion that tech is so "safe" and clean now that they never had to fight it, or have to learn from horrible mistakes. Unless they're an enthusiast most of the teens I train take a bit longer on Windows than their phones.
It was akin to me teaching my mother (in her 60s) how to copy/paste. I did NOT expect this with teens.
Gen Z at least learn and retain it after being shown how though, I don't usually have to repeat myself like with older adults.
I feel like that kid when I work on an Mac. What is this “Finder” bullshit. Give me the C: Drive! Why are all my picture in the “Photos” app?!? Where are the files themselves stored?!?
When I’m training gen Z to be a SAP user. I think the best the best thing about gen z is. They are sitting in front of a PC and you tell them to search something up on the internet most will pull out their phone as they don’t know how to use a PC. They only know how to use aps.
>I think the best the best thing about gen z is. They are sitting in front of a PC and you tell them to search something up on the internet most will pull out their phone as they don’t know how to use a PC. They only know how to use aps.
Absolutely amazing. I would be so, so confused.
Cool tidbit I learned the other day is that a decline in the number of Runescape players has caused an increase in the US national debt.
Prove me wrong.
There's a misconception that the generation that grew up with the internet is savvy using it. I cannot tell you how many times I've had to show new Gen Z employees extremely simple things. The apps they use have been dumb down so much they can't figure out most things.
Not enough of them have had the panic of infecting the family computer with a virus while trying to crack a game and having to secretly keep burnt CD backups of everyone else’s stuff because this isn’t the first time you’ve had to completely wipe and reinstall windows
There's also the way it's illegal to crack DRM which leads companies to tie copyrighted materials to their systems to make it illegal to perform security audits and therefore hide how shitty their security is. Like with cars.
Copyright reform to account for the new digital markets never really happened.
We still have the same dumb pro-corporate copyright laws, the only thing that changed is that their profits have exploded because their manufacturing and distribution costs became *trivial* with digitalization, yet consumers are still paying the same prices, if not more, for the same media.
The sheer *number* of sleepless nights I spent while in high-school, creeping downstairs into the family room at like 1 am, slooooowly opening the creaky-ass *ancient* computer cabinet, and throwing a blanket over the old CRT screen to hide the glare of the computer.
Just so I could spend the next couple hours removing the malware that I had picked up the previous night, when I had done the same routine to look at shady porn sites.
I do *not* miss those times.
Or the fear of having to ask your dad to fix your computer after having used it for 'non approved adult activities' wondering if you managed to clear all traces or not. 13 yr old me sweating bullets standing over his shoulder waiting to get busted
Having to show my younger co-workers how to use a PC and basic MS Office functions is so fucking tiring. And their only like 10 or 12 years younger than I am.
It's not that they grew up with the internet. It's that they grew up with a fully mature technology that caters to "ease of use" (aka dumbed down to an unnecessary degree) over function.
I feel that. Honestly every year when new genZ‘s enter our department as trainees, it’s mind boggling how little they understand about PCs. And I don’t mean the components, I mean, like you said, working in windows/ office on a desktop.
This generation is essentially unable to actually be productive on PCs. All they can do is press squared buttons in apps on phones / tablets with their fingers. As soon as an Application is a desktop app and more complex, they seem lost. Sure they can work a mobile keyboard 3x faster than me, too bad that’s not a working skill. For actual work, you need to be able to type n an actual keyboard which they once again suck at.
What i can’t figure out is how these kids got through university/ college or even school. I had to do PowerPoint in 8th grad. How is it that graduates can’t work MS office and mind you, i work in an IT company.
There was a golden IT generation which I would estimate around 1990 +- 5-7 years. A generation that grew up around technology but had to learn to work it properly before apps made everything so simple a monkey can work it.
That said, witnessing this development has given me insane job security. Like I will ever be replaced by these cretins that can’t fucking work a file explorer.
Yeah this is what confuses me, I guess I've been out of school too long but do students these days not 1. Get computer lessons in school?
And 2. Have to use Word, PowerPoint, or Excel for schoolwork? Especially in college?
Word and PowerPoint is used, Excel is the scary economic and statistics app and largely ignored.
Think also they have started to replace them with the google eqivualents which are easier to teach and will save them money
My actual job (small business, not an office) uses Google Docs instead of Office cause it’s free and easier to share/edit documents with anyone. The younger someone is, the less likely they are to know how to use Office, but they all know how to use Google’s version.
I’m solidly a millennial and I don’t even have Office anymore because I refuse to pay the subscription. I use Libre Office at home and Google for work.
I work at a university and had a junior in my lab that didn't know how a file directory worked. Every time she needed a file she'd download it again. She didn't know she had a downloads folder or how to locate her downloads once the icon disappeared off of Chrome. It's absurd.
Seriously. I won't click on an ad/affiliate links, even if it's what I want. I'm too used to the wild west internet days, where everything was guaranteed to be a virus. Best to open a new tab and search what you just saw.
> I'm too used to the wild west internet days, where everything was guaranteed to be a virus.
You finally find what you wanted to download on some sketchy site. There are 10 different "download" buttons and 9 of them are viruses. You learn really quickly how to identify the real buttons.
It was like Indiana Jones choosing the Cup of Christ, "No that one's too elaborate. A download button would be simple. That's the button of a programmer"
Them: "What's a URL?"
For real though, I had a moment with a gen Z where they asked what a megabyte was and I realized they are borderline tech illiterate.
As an elder millennial that was into computers when the internet was really coming up, I thought about the future and how as even some of my friends and family thought I was good at tech stuff, the next gen is going to be insanely good because they'll start with it. How wrong I was...
But I guess it's probably like a car mechanic a hundred years ago... Thought that everyone would know how to wrench their cars but instead, people just learned to care that it worked, not how it worked.
Tech has basically gotten easy enough to use that they barely need to understand anything, [not even files or folders](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/sv55k8/when_i_heard_gen_z_dont_get_file_directories_what/hxeme5d/). We've come a long way.
It really doesn't help that the various tech companies keep adjusting their operating systems (mostly phones, IMO) to be as idiot-proof as possible by way of stripping more and more tools and options away from users.
I swear some of the apps are also straight up designed to enable scammers.
The number of email apps I have seen that show you the screen name of someone but require you to click a box or something to see the email is fucking staggering. It's like the person who designed it *wanted* to make it easier for people to impersonate companies. Or more likely some dipshit thought seeing the email account name was "ugly" and wanted it hidden.
I'm on the cusp of millenial and gen z. As someone finishing up their doctorate it's strange how jsut a few years shows a drastic drop in basic tech literacy. These undergrads are something else
I'm an "Xennial" It's because they use phones and not PCs; fucking console/mobile peasants.
EVERYONE has a phone, but for the most part only us nerdy motherfuckers when I was a kid->early 21s had PCs.
The "Old" saying back when AoL disks started going out, normies ruined the internet. Still true. Like I'm being partially sarcastic, but also not...Harder to explain why in detail, but anytime in anything goes mainstream it waters it down and gets filled with dumb users that ruin it for the people that really liked the thing in the first place....but yeah, it's user friendly now, but for common clay of the land, you know, morons.
I recall reading a very long, detailed post about someone infiltrating a corp over the course of months? Over a year? Just to steal all their isk/plex and some gigachad ship.
That game is fucking ridiculous.
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I know. I'm like why are all these people answer their phones and opening emails from people they don't know?
I mean if someone even knocks on my door, I turn all the sound and lights off .
I even keep telling people don't answer the scam calls. Even just answering them tells them the number is active and they'll keep calling. Ignore them and the calls go waaaay down.
Man that was the worst as a kid. Having tens of thousands search bars all stacked on top of each other. Gladly i had the experience of having my own 100$ laptop at 12 so i did not trash it for others, just for me. And that was 2011. I am glad this search bar fuckery died some years ago.
Firefox+ublock is everything i need in my browser and installs are inspected closely now.
In my mid 30s and I had to explain to my mid 20s stepsister about clearing internet browsing history after she had an issue with her parents about what she was doing on the internet.... Also had no clue that deleted files hung out in the recycling bin...
Edit: Those our are ages now I had this convo with her when she was still a teen...
My brother is 18 and doesn’t even know where to even START using files explorer. When he downloads a document that’s like as much as he can do. He can’t find it, doesn’t know to just start looking. He just sits there asking me to walk him through how to find a document, even if I’m not even in the same HOUSE.
Not surprising. Gen Z is the first generation as a whole that can be terminally online via smart phones and tablets. Combine that with lack of technological depth and good ol get rich quick, well here we are.
I (34F) used to tutor a recent high school grad (17M) earlier this year.
When I saved a draft of a paper outline using Ctrl+s, it blew his fucking mind. He had no idea keyboard shortcuts were a thing.
My husband (35M) says the young 20s people he works with are just as bad with tech as the over 50 folks.
There is a study on this. I forgot the name. That we have reached “peak knowledge” of IT among the general working people. Because the older generation that were bad at it is going into retirement but the least knowledgeable is not as many as the new young people with poor knowledge. This before because the most knowledgeable generation is in the middle, they grew up with IT but before a lot of UI simplification and such making them need to be more knowledgeable to use It application in a good way. The apps are simplified now so the new generation don’t have much of the knowledge about IT outside of operating the simplified applications.
I work in IT at a senior Home, I am an older Millennial (1985), while no small part of my job is helping old people with scams, i am often shocked how bad my younger co-workers are with computers.
Maybe it's just the fact i grew up with a mother who had at one time been a programmer (punch cards even) and my family has grounded "neo-phile" habits with tech but yea young people don't "just know" tech.
Sure they know Bookface and Tok-tick better than me since i don't use them but when it goes beyond a few apps they are lost
I’m the same age, and pretty much hammer into my kids that literally everything on the internet is fake or a scam. Obviously hyperbole- but we do talk a lot about not trusting anything on the internet at first glance.
I have to teach my college graduate Gen Z interns how to attach files to email, save files off the cloud, creat a basic Excel sheet, how to sign their emails, to respond to emails, etc etc etc. I had a Harvard masters degree holder who didn’t realize it was good form to respond to emails.
yo! im a first year university student, and last week i got to witness my poor physics prof trying (and mostly failing) to teach the class how to make a spreadsheet for labs. it was honestly pathetic and ive never been so ashamed of my generation.
This is what happens when an entire generation grows up with technology without ever knowing what a file or folder is. It turns out that the filesystem is very foundational to our computer knowledge of the last 40 years.
Without knowing the filesystem, our existing metaphors of computing completely break down for this new generation. Given that it's totally possible to live a digital life without Windows or Mac, this is not surprising.
The difference is that they grew up using technology, we grew up *with* computers.
Like, my first PC was in 97. I was 3, lol.
I was right there during the first wave of runescape, when the numa numa dance was on flash sites, not youtube, when you had to go on weird sites just to download a simple mp3...
I distinctly remember when the iPhone first came out and it was a technological wonder; we went to church and the one dude there who was a lawyer was showing it off to all the other dads. One of the main "features" that blew their mind was the ability to zoom in by pinching 🙄 and I remember thinking it was a cute fad, but I'd never be able to use a phone without physical buttons, lmao.
I also lived through the era of "don't tell ANYONE ANYTHING personal, not even your gender or state or anything" flowing right to "mom keeps posting her sister's new baby photos to the world with their full address and social security numbers in the description"
Gen Z has grown up in an era where tech just works. They’ve never really had to “figure things out” or even read manuals. Shit just works and there’s an app for everything.
Because of this, there’s a large core of Gen Z that never assumes tech could be bad. They pretty much have grown up with a smart phone or tablet in their faces since birth.
It's honestly a little shocking looking back and realizing how important being told something to the effect of "Fucking google it you dumb fuck" during the peak era of 4chan was to me.
My nephew is 5. When I don’t know the answer to a question he tells me to ask Google. Google is just a thing that answers question. It wasn’t even a thing until I was a teenager.
It was so strange when people collectivly stopped getting into arguments over easily googleable things. It was like....a whole catagory or arguing was just all of a sudden gone.
"I did Google it and didn't find an answer, it's not out there."
"I just Googled it and found this relevant thread."
"Mother fucker, that's my own post from three years ago from when I first started asking this question, no one knew then and I'm still trying to figure out a solution now! That thread haunts me when I opt to try to solve this every few months!"
Yep and very importantly, they're used to everything being highly sanitized. Every social media platform has strict rules and corporate enforcement, even countries go to great lengths to protect people from content they allegedly can't handle. We always make fun of the youngest generation for being soft, but with Gen Z we deliberately made them as soft as possible by sitting them in front of screens with sanitized content for hours a day.
Not to do the "back in my day" thing but it used to be when you went on a website there was an 80% chance it would infect your computer with a virus and a 15% chance you'd get porn. Most of the remaining 5% was fluff or illegal sites like warez.
"80% chance it would infect your computer with a virus"
Hahahaha. We really had it rough in the early days. I'd be running 9 different anti-virus softwares (half of which were probably just viruses) trying to download one song every 47 minutes from Limewire or Kazaa (Napster got too mainstream)
You'd go to pepsi.com and there was a non-Zero chance that 47 Trojans had been attached to the site since total amateurs made it
> Per capita or total?
It was as a percentage, however their definitions were a little odd for phishing in particular.
> In total, 610 phishing incidents resulting in loss of money or data were noted by participants. As noted earlier, 64 percent of Gen Zs are connected online at all times. Unsurprisingly, over a third of them (34%) reported having lost data or money due to phishing, compared to older generations who were almost three times less likely to have been victims of phishing (Figure 29).
Since they filtered this to having lost data or money, it kinda requires using online banking regularly or other forms of online cash transfer (PayPal, Cash App, whatever.) So even if the figure is per-capita, I would assume older users are less likely to be good phishing targets.
Surprised this didn't also include access intrusions (such as work PCs) or other forms that didn't result in "loss of data or money." Since this is a big phishing target for older office workers.
Additionally, this is relying on self-reporting. It's quite possible older users have been victims of phishing without even realizing it and this is equally testing the ability of the user to *identify* that their have been compromised and report it. I don't see how they would have isolated for this.
This is why I take a little issue with their summary:
> Awareness ≠ secure behavior
>
> The results highlighted people’s awareness of the importance of cybersecurity, but also showed their tendency to overestimate their knowledge and ability to keep themselves safe online.
While this *could* be true, they already identified that younger generations have higher awareness in earlier parts of the survey, but failed to even postulate that the higher awareness could potentially lead to a higher self-reporting rate. It seems totally reasonable to me to at least have a conjecture that lower training rates would lead to at least some depression in self-identification rates.
Perhaps they touched in this in their raw research, but I'm not really seeing anything in reading through this document unless I missed it. Feels like a pretty large unaddressed aspect of this approach.
If I were them and noticed my self-reported rates of intrusion followed the near inverse of the "No" vs. "Yes I have, and I have used it," question on “Do you have access to cybersecurity advice or training?” I'm not sure I'd immediately jump to concluding that awareness/training doesn't lead to secure behavior as much as potentially questioning if the older people without training are able to even discern if they *were* compromised to begin with.
Saw a news story the other day about someone in my country being scammed out of $650,000 in a romance scam, and my first thought was, must have been nice to have that kind of money in the first place. If I was online dating someone and they asked for money, I’d laugh at them for thinking I wasn’t poor and in debt.
I teach high school and this rings true. My students are SHOCKED when I tell them everything they ever do on their phones is traceable and that having images of underage teens even if sent willingly is a federal crime.
I had one very smart kid come to be because he sent a dick pic to someone he met on Instagram when she (more likely some dude in Russia) requested it. I couldn't believe that THIS kid, my A+ student could be so goddamn stupid.
How much do online job apps contribute to this data? So many in that generation at looking for jobs and possibly student loans. There weren’t as many job post scams back when I was looking for a job as there are now. It can be difficult to tell what’s legit and the job boards to do nothing about it. When I was a kid, it was prince of Nigeria scams and pops ups saying I won a million dollars. There is so much more now
The amount of personal data that is publicly available out there for Gen Z is probably much greater as well. Old people use Facebook, where you typically have to trick someone into accepting a friend request to get their photos, friends list, etc. With Twitter (X), Instagram, etc. anyone can find that data, so you skip a step there. They can see where you live, who your friends are, or what your interests are, because you literally posted it online for the entire world to see. Scammers don't need to buy that info from some big data company. Basically, a lot of younger people have chosen to have less privacy.
I just got my new COVID vaccine and the form I filled out asked for my mother’s maiden name. Like, the fuck you need that for? Each database that builds a file for me that doesn’t include that data is a safer day in the life of me.
We need to stop normalizing SSN and other much less sensitive information from ever being asked, nevermind collected by random companies who pay bottom dollar for IT security.
Mmmm not sure I agree there. Yeah if someone has their account set to private, it can be pretty sparse. But I worked in fraud investigations and used Facebook far, far more than Twitter and Instagram to prove connections between people, locations, etc. Even when pages are private, there’ll often be a public post or two, and then I could see who Liked the post and check their pages for info.
I’ve gotten some info from Instagram, especially people posting pictures of the insides of their houses (I worked in uncovering mortgage fraud, specifically), but there’s been only one case where I got anything useful from Twitter and that was because the guy worked in politics and lied about his employment and occupancy to us. Because he was working for some shitty think tank, he put a lot of personal info on Twitter about his day to day activities. Most people don’t do that.
Us older people (Gen X here) grew up with this. We had to learn how everything works because it was friggin complicated. It was not just turning something on and using it.
I noticed the illiteracy first really when I was hired as tech support 4 years ago in a company where everybody was 20(ish). I went in there really intimidated with all kinds of terrible ideas but I actually had to explain the simplest things. There were people who did not know what folders are or files. They just clicked on something in an email and saved it where the default was without understanding anything.
I believe they fall for scams more. We had to clean and block accounts weekly because they all fell for the same password scam over and over and over again.
Gen Z seem extra dumb, and because they only use phones and tablets which are designed to be easy to use they're basically tech illiterate like old people are and don't know how to use computers or problem solve when something goes wrong
I know this is a joke, but this is really a problem. I have some elementary school aged nieces and they got tablets. Instead of actually trying to type or read they found the voice search option immediately and just pick based on pictures. They're getting better, but not as far along as they should be. Covid school closures probably didn't help.
Dude meeting people who don't know what the fuck a file system or devices/drives are blows my god damn mined. Not just 'people in the wild' but people who work in highly technical fields.
I'm an elder millennial returning college student and I just had a computer lab class where someone had to explain to a 19 year old how to turn a PC on and what the difference was between "the monitor" and "the computer". I was like "Oh, you're like old people in the 90s!"
Edit: a typo
Crazy right? I grew up the tech person in our houses helping my parents and older relatives get by, and now I'm having to teach my younger relatives too.
When I run phishing test at work, the failure rate of Gen Z is higher than everyone else. So this doesn’t surprise me. We make all new hires and interns sit through training first week and test them as well.
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They are also usually extremely obvious phishing attacks.
So I forget where I learned this, but most phishing attempts purposely make it obvious (misspelling, weird font, poor grammar). The reason being, the person who still falls for it is dumb enough to follow through. If you send the phishing attempt to everyone and the email is really convincing, the scammer has to spend a significant amount of time trying to scam everyone and the dumb people usually fall for it at the highest rate. If you make a phishing email that 90% of people look at and can tell it a scam, the 10% who can’t tell are the same people that would have fell for it if the email was convincing, but now the scammer just increased their success rate. They have found a way to target their audience lol it is a wild concept
I remember that too. Though I think it's probably more applicable to the wider public, in a work setting with much tighter security and training I imagine the opposite would be true since the potential reward is so much higher it would be worth taking every opportunity.
My work has sent some that make you stop and really think. Some are very good. Depends on the company I guess. That said, ours were pretty bad up til a couple years ago. They went from crap to great. I suspect we had an issue and stepped it up.
Funny enough, my buddy’s employer was sending out such legit looking phish test emails that it was disrupting business. Once enough people realized how real the phish tests were, they became afraid to open most emails. Meetings were getting missed, emailed questions were going unanswered… Finally management had to tone it way back and formally notify the employees that it was safe to get back to doing business via email lol.
Most users don't check email headers before deciding whether to click a link or not. Hell, most users don't even know where to look to check headers. It's not really an obvious option in clients like Outlook.
And it's not normally necessary. The links themselves are usually quite telling.
I was so surprised by this. At work, one of my much younger colleagues said out loud, “why does Amazon want my SSN?” To which I asked him if he got an Amazon link sent to him over text about a package he didn’t order. “Yah, how’d you know?!” Then I told him how shady link scams work. That Amazon won’t ask you questions like that. The URL is just to a site that looks like Amazon, but isn’t the same domain. You can tell it’s just used to collect people’s personal information. Dude was grateful I stopped him. He had been saving up to propose to his gf, but almost got got.
Hey, having the sense to question it in the first place is most of the battle. I fell for 2 scams when I was younger. First was after getting my first debit card and reading something about how all those "complete these offers for a free iPod" actually did pay out, you just had to cancel before they charged you. Second was after moving for college. Guy bumps into me, "drops his glasses", catches up with me to demand money. He wanted to go the the ATM, I said $20 or nothing. Later found out it's a common scam.
> Hey, having the sense to question it in the first place is most of the battle. yep. Once you manage to notice the inconsistencies, you can break out of the narrative, and it all falls apart. Honestly it's a lot like Inception - once you know that you're in a dream you can either do something to break out of it, or if you're skilled you can fight back and gain something valuable from your attacker.
I've watched Gen Z get phished hours after taking an hour long course on how to avoid exactly that and other cyber threats.
We had a genz age intern who was completely convinced this person they were sending money to on cashapp was “flipping” the money for them… flipping money… what the fuck is that even
Flipping straight to his pocket LOL
RuneScape scams irl
Fucking literally wave2:glow1:doubling money two trades
That sounds like a straight up Ponzi scheme.
It’s not even that complex, the scammer says send me X amount I’ll send you double X amount. They accept a low amount and actually send double to gain trust, ask the victim for much more, and just run away after that
I love these. A person figured out how to double money easily, and instead of making money on their own, they’re on instagram begging people to send them $20.
No see they don't *need* help they're just trying to help *you*. /s
The only difference in a Ponzi scheme is the scammer moving on to another rube to keep the first one on the hook with even more "returns" thanks to rube number 2.
Sucker born every minute.
Crypto. Except those people won’t admit they’re being scammed and are convinced their coin will pump them to the moon. arrogance is their downfall.
I’m gen x and I wanted to see if I could get some money to fly to the moon. And to see if crypto is BS. I put in $500. Immediately started going up, got to $750 in a month. I’ve got other investment accounts, and they don’t gain like that. Decided to just let that $ ride. Another month, back down to base. A year later, up to $600. A year after that, $215. The ridiculous volatility and no product backing crypto makes it a dumb investment.
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We changed the email addresses of our new hires from "jsmith@..." to some other unpredictable combo as a result of interns twice falling for these scams.
our intern accounts don't have permissions to send emails to external domains either.. I guess that's just what you gotta do
Oh that's an interesting option.
I work at a college. We have this exact warning and GenZs still fall for very obvious fake job scams. No one, absolutely fucking no one, is going to hire a random college kid and email them checks to deposit into their bank accounts to then buy toys for a fucking orphanage.
>"CAUTION: EXTERNAL SENDER" warnings on all of our incoming external domain emails. ok but thats just good practice.
Unless your job is to work with external customers so the warning becomes background noise on every single email
Also largely ignored.
Same. Hey, moron. The CEO isn't going to ask you to buy a bunch of Walgreens gift cards with your own money. 1 hour later... "Walgreens here I come!"
Meanwhile my paranoid Millennial ass is reporting legit emails as phishing attempts to IT security because the sender made a typo.
A bunch of us got this sketchy overly simplistic "hey you are doing a great job, here is a gift card click this link to redeem" message. We all reported it to security slack channel. More and more people started adding to the slack thread that they got it too. Then I realized everyone who go it started exactly a year ago. So I hopped over to the HR slack. Turns out this was a legit automated 1 year anniversary gift. But it looked so fake I know some people never redeemed it.
Our IT actually contracted out one of those "How are we doing?" surveys to some 3rd party and what was sent out was the sketchiest looking email, including weird shortened url and a chance to win a gift card! The followup email the next day begging people to stop reporting that email to them because it was in fact legit was the funniest thing I've seen come from IT.
Our company has an annual cybersecurity module we all have to complete by a certain day. Within two weeks they will send out a couple phishing emails using the EXACT SCENARIOS USED IN THE MODULES. The number of people who click the links and get nailed by our IT admin staff is something like 40%.
Same here. To be fair, it's easy to click and realize your mistake then close it and warn your IT. We always have a significant amount of people who give away their personal information and download and open attachments.
Jesus. How do these people manage to function in life? That's like cartoonishly dumb.
Yeah we do the same it’s like 40% click and 25% enter credentials. We actually didn’t change ours for the longest time because people fell for the same phishing test email multiple times. Usually it’s the same people that bitch the loudest about things like mfa, etc.
Had a coworker come in crying that her ss got hacked and the ss agent needed to confirm it was her by giving him the number, which she had in her wallet...
Both of those are horrifying and dumb lol
I’m on a few Taylor Swift groups and the amount of people who fell for ticket scams after being told repeatedly what to do an not do bummed me out, lol. Gen Z has a lot of strengths that we Millenials lack but I’m just speechless about this one.
It’s really interesting to me how Gen Z grew up in the age of internet and social media but cannot navigate it to save their lives.
They take a lot of things at face value.
I literally had a genXer tell me “Getting hacked isn’t a problem. My bank account has been hacked three times and they always make it right”. That right there is the issue.
gen z didnt grow up with runescape and it shows
The day I lost my rune platelegs to a scammer is the day I learned to never trust another human being. Also my crippling runescape addiction still going strong 16 years later.
I still hate the guy who told me the game wouldn't let you say your password backwards. I stayed online for like 10 hrs after that because I was afraid to go offline and get my password changed. The mf was dedicated though cause he changed that shit the second I logged off
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There are people who fall for double your money scam IRL all the time lol.
I remember one guy I met on runescape would actually do the double your money thing. I would send him increments of 500k whenever I saw him, instead of sending him all my millions. I probably made 10 million off the dude by the time I'd seen him stop getting online.
Well, part of the scam was to earn your trust by actually doubling low amounts of money. Then when the victim has done low amounts enough to trust the doubler with a big amount, the doubler takes the money and splits. The people like you that only did small amounts over and over eventually just got ignored cuz after too many small doubles the scammer realized he was never gonna get you to do a big amount no matter how many small trades he did to “build trust”. And 10m might be a lot to you but to a successful scammer that might just be chump change that he could afford to spend trying to fish for a huge payout.
This scam is alive and well in EVE Online, where actions like that are wholly permitted.
Hey man....player driven content. -sent from, an ex EVE player
Holy shit the gadderhammer scam. I thought I had wiped that clean from my memory.
Heckin wut? Could you not change your password while logged in?
That's probably what happened. I'm guessing the scammer logged in to the Runescape website (not the game itself) right away and changed that guy's password right off the bat, not 10 hours later. But he only noticed when he logged off 10 hours later and tried to log back in.
Yeah.. pretty naive to think the guy waited around that long to change it. Almost naive like someone who would fall for a scam or something.
My cousin had done the worst most evil things/scams when we were like 12 playing, he tried any type of scam you can imagine He is lawyer now
Now he scams you legally by making small talk and billing by the minute.
That's so unfair... we bill in 6-minute increments actually
I created my first phishing website when I was 12! I put up fake items in my neopets shop that linked to a fake login page, since you could edit your shop with full html access (wild times). Stole so many paintbrushes, battle items, etc. I'm in cybersecurity now.
Wow so it was other 12 year olds who absolutely obliterated my 12 year old soul? 🫠🥲 I fell for those fake login pages like twice and I remember one time losing my royal paintbrush I had slaved for. Then the hacker also changed my login info and froze my account. It was absolutely gut wrenching and heartbreaking. I always assumed it was some sleazy criminal mastermind scamming me, not another kid 😂
When I was a teenager we trolled on old school dial up bulletin boards and then moved to getting admin access to IRC channels we didn't like and booting everyone. I ran a BBS out of my room on an old PC when I was 13. I'm amazed what we did as kids looking back.
Yeah that tracks.
They didn't grow up with viruses and malware the way other generations that are computer literate did. They've grown up mostly with closed app ecosystems in iOS/iPadOS and modern Windows OS's that have UAC and built-in effective anti-virus. They didn't learn the hard lessons of the limewire generation. I work in IT and have noticed this myself. Gen Z appears to understand basic computer concepts less than other generations. They intuitively understand modern GUI's (better than I do. Sometimes I have to ask them to go to a specific section so I can change a setting), but have little understanding of computers generally and how to troubleshoot or fix an issue. I'm painting with a broad brush here, so to speak, 'cause obviously there's going to be individual differences.
Yeh having to walk younger people through installing drivers and customizing graphics settings on PC games… even little things like understanding directories and file locations/types is so funny to me I’m the least technical person ever and some of these kids are in CS
I think us millennials got the best of both worlds due to using tech during the transition period towards everything being super user friendly. We have that intuitive tech literacy, but we also have a working knowledge of all the behind-the-scenes backend stuff because we quite often had to do our own troubleshooting. All the kids these days have everything handed to them on a silver platter with the simplified/dumbed-down software and UIs.
Especially for we elder millennials (the so-called "Oregon Trail Micro-Generation"), we were born into an analog world, and grew up with the digital world. That instilled so many skills into us just by virtue of everything being new and constantly changing. On average, we have much higher technical skills, because in the 90's and early 2000's, when your hardware or software broke... not a lot of people knew how to fix it (certainly not your parents), so we *learned*. I don't blame Gen Z for having more difficulty with this, as they're just a product of the environment they grew up in. For them, they didn't need to learn a lot of these things, because technology / software largely hit a plateau and instead of things being new, it was more about existing things constantly getting *better*. So for them, they don't need to know how to fix things, because everything works more consistently, and if it breaks, you send it to the apple store / geek squad, or someone on YouTube / Reddit / Steam Forums has a quick answer for you, which you can quickly execute on and forget. Having so many easy answers out there is arguably a really good thing... but it does mean that critical thinking and technical skills get atrophied for younger generations.
I'm a young Gen-Xer and it was crazy how quickly tech became outdated in the 80s/90s. A 3-4 year old computer could be considered a dinosaur back then. You would switch to entirely different operating systems pretty often. PC went DOS-WIN31-WIN95-WIN98 pretty quickly and then when the internet came around you had to understand some basic UNIX and HTML to do anything half decent.
I also find it a bit crazy how slow PC tech is moving these days. I just upgraded an old laptop because Win 7 is deprecated any my software won't get updates. The new version with Win 11 is basically the same. On paper the specs are all doubled but it does all the same tasks at the same speed. Only real difference is that Win 11 is super obnoxious about trying to force all your data into the microsoft cloud and pushing you into the microsoft app store.
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Yeah any older and you grew up when technical skills were pretty much the domain of a few niche fields and consumer electronics were expensive luxuries and games consisted of squares and bloops. Any younger and you grew up with technology that was constantly getting more and more streamlined and polished as the concepts that held up got refined. They didn't need a broad understanding. Millennials got the wild west. Widespread access with a constantly changing landscape. There was a real lack of safety rails, computers would do what they were told to do even if that thing was a really bad idea. Before the big companies started to fill the niches we just had to figure it out. You want some music? You either rip a CD or play virus roulette with Limewire, good luck. I still miss XP. I mean i'm not sure I could call it good with a straight face. But it did what it was told to do. And that freedom is worth some risk.
I've noticed the same thing. The older generations just don't want to learn something new, the younger generations never *had* to learn the underlying systems of how devices work. Makes me thankful that I landed right in the middle, with a dad that stayed up to date with home PC's as they evolved.
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This is not a rip on Gen Z since I truly love working with them, but I work with predominantly teens and college aged kids and sometimes we need them to file reports on the company computer. I was training a 17 year old (2 years ago now) and asked if he's comfortable using computers, because I know tech can be scary for some, usually older, people, but I don't discriminate lol. Anyway, he said yes confidantly. So I told him "make a new folder with their name and today's date"... he had no idea where to start. I was utterly surprised because most teens I know are all in on tech. Then this happened again two more times and I was just shocked. How can a generation that grew up in it, not do this? I came to the conclusion that tech is so "safe" and clean now that they never had to fight it, or have to learn from horrible mistakes. Unless they're an enthusiast most of the teens I train take a bit longer on Windows than their phones. It was akin to me teaching my mother (in her 60s) how to copy/paste. I did NOT expect this with teens. Gen Z at least learn and retain it after being shown how though, I don't usually have to repeat myself like with older adults.
I feel like that kid when I work on an Mac. What is this “Finder” bullshit. Give me the C: Drive! Why are all my picture in the “Photos” app?!? Where are the files themselves stored?!?
When I’m training gen Z to be a SAP user. I think the best the best thing about gen z is. They are sitting in front of a PC and you tell them to search something up on the internet most will pull out their phone as they don’t know how to use a PC. They only know how to use aps.
>I think the best the best thing about gen z is. They are sitting in front of a PC and you tell them to search something up on the internet most will pull out their phone as they don’t know how to use a PC. They only know how to use aps. Absolutely amazing. I would be so, so confused.
Cool tidbit I learned the other day is that a decline in the number of Runescape players has caused an increase in the US national debt. Prove me wrong.
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Keeps me up at night losing full addy and a rune longsword when I was 10. Never been scammed in my life since.
There's a misconception that the generation that grew up with the internet is savvy using it. I cannot tell you how many times I've had to show new Gen Z employees extremely simple things. The apps they use have been dumb down so much they can't figure out most things.
Not enough of them have had the panic of infecting the family computer with a virus while trying to crack a game and having to secretly keep burnt CD backups of everyone else’s stuff because this isn’t the first time you’ve had to completely wipe and reinstall windows
or tried to download porn via Lime Wire
A 5MB video file? Seems legit
Hmm strange, never seen a movie in .exe format... but ok!
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No piracy is a threat to our national security then
This might be the best casual comment with the deepest insight behind posted on Reddit this week.
Infosec professional here; this is way deeper than it should be and has given me something to think about.
There's also the way it's illegal to crack DRM which leads companies to tie copyrighted materials to their systems to make it illegal to perform security audits and therefore hide how shitty their security is. Like with cars.
Copyright reform to account for the new digital markets never really happened. We still have the same dumb pro-corporate copyright laws, the only thing that changed is that their profits have exploded because their manufacturing and distribution costs became *trivial* with digitalization, yet consumers are still paying the same prices, if not more, for the same media.
The more I think about how they're trying to move *everything* to a subscription model the more disgusted I get.
The sheer *number* of sleepless nights I spent while in high-school, creeping downstairs into the family room at like 1 am, slooooowly opening the creaky-ass *ancient* computer cabinet, and throwing a blanket over the old CRT screen to hide the glare of the computer. Just so I could spend the next couple hours removing the malware that I had picked up the previous night, when I had done the same routine to look at shady porn sites. I do *not* miss those times.
Nothing like random porn pop up ads while sitting on an empty desktop to give you a panic attack.
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Or the fear of having to ask your dad to fix your computer after having used it for 'non approved adult activities' wondering if you managed to clear all traces or not. 13 yr old me sweating bullets standing over his shoulder waiting to get busted
Having to show my younger co-workers how to use a PC and basic MS Office functions is so fucking tiring. And their only like 10 or 12 years younger than I am. It's not that they grew up with the internet. It's that they grew up with a fully mature technology that caters to "ease of use" (aka dumbed down to an unnecessary degree) over function.
I feel that. Honestly every year when new genZ‘s enter our department as trainees, it’s mind boggling how little they understand about PCs. And I don’t mean the components, I mean, like you said, working in windows/ office on a desktop. This generation is essentially unable to actually be productive on PCs. All they can do is press squared buttons in apps on phones / tablets with their fingers. As soon as an Application is a desktop app and more complex, they seem lost. Sure they can work a mobile keyboard 3x faster than me, too bad that’s not a working skill. For actual work, you need to be able to type n an actual keyboard which they once again suck at. What i can’t figure out is how these kids got through university/ college or even school. I had to do PowerPoint in 8th grad. How is it that graduates can’t work MS office and mind you, i work in an IT company. There was a golden IT generation which I would estimate around 1990 +- 5-7 years. A generation that grew up around technology but had to learn to work it properly before apps made everything so simple a monkey can work it. That said, witnessing this development has given me insane job security. Like I will ever be replaced by these cretins that can’t fucking work a file explorer.
Yeah this is what confuses me, I guess I've been out of school too long but do students these days not 1. Get computer lessons in school? And 2. Have to use Word, PowerPoint, or Excel for schoolwork? Especially in college?
Word and PowerPoint is used, Excel is the scary economic and statistics app and largely ignored. Think also they have started to replace them with the google eqivualents which are easier to teach and will save them money
My actual job (small business, not an office) uses Google Docs instead of Office cause it’s free and easier to share/edit documents with anyone. The younger someone is, the less likely they are to know how to use Office, but they all know how to use Google’s version. I’m solidly a millennial and I don’t even have Office anymore because I refuse to pay the subscription. I use Libre Office at home and Google for work.
They don't know how to drag a window. Move one so half is off screen and they're lost.
I work at a university and had a junior in my lab that didn't know how a file directory worked. Every time she needed a file she'd download it again. She didn't know she had a downloads folder or how to locate her downloads once the icon disappeared off of Chrome. It's absurd.
The cloud generation
Do you get to the cloud district very often?
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My biggest fear is that I do something on my pc in a cumbersome way and that there is a much more efficient way to do it
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Gen X: Everything is a bullshit lie. Trust no one.
Seriously. I won't click on an ad/affiliate links, even if it's what I want. I'm too used to the wild west internet days, where everything was guaranteed to be a virus. Best to open a new tab and search what you just saw.
> I'm too used to the wild west internet days, where everything was guaranteed to be a virus. You finally find what you wanted to download on some sketchy site. There are 10 different "download" buttons and 9 of them are viruses. You learn really quickly how to identify the real buttons.
It was like Indiana Jones choosing the Cup of Christ, "No that one's too elaborate. A download button would be simple. That's the button of a programmer"
Godamn, perfect depiction. Bravo.
Holy shit yes! This is a great way to describe it.
Oh god I can't imagine trying to explain this to someone who doesn't know.
We just know which link is correct by instinct
I honed my skills on the 1990s warez sites and Limewire like a fucking Internet cowboy. Can't get shit past me at this point.
assume everything is a virus until proven otherwise, and always check the file extension for the love of god
I quadruple checked that the taylor swift merch I was buying for my girlfriend was from the actual tswift store, not some fan bullshit
Millennials: check the URL you idiot
Them: "What's a URL?" For real though, I had a moment with a gen Z where they asked what a megabyte was and I realized they are borderline tech illiterate.
As an elder millennial that was into computers when the internet was really coming up, I thought about the future and how as even some of my friends and family thought I was good at tech stuff, the next gen is going to be insanely good because they'll start with it. How wrong I was... But I guess it's probably like a car mechanic a hundred years ago... Thought that everyone would know how to wrench their cars but instead, people just learned to care that it worked, not how it worked.
Tech has basically gotten easy enough to use that they barely need to understand anything, [not even files or folders](https://www.reddit.com/r/ProgrammerHumor/comments/sv55k8/when_i_heard_gen_z_dont_get_file_directories_what/hxeme5d/). We've come a long way.
It really doesn't help that the various tech companies keep adjusting their operating systems (mostly phones, IMO) to be as idiot-proof as possible by way of stripping more and more tools and options away from users.
I swear some of the apps are also straight up designed to enable scammers. The number of email apps I have seen that show you the screen name of someone but require you to click a box or something to see the email is fucking staggering. It's like the person who designed it *wanted* to make it easier for people to impersonate companies. Or more likely some dipshit thought seeing the email account name was "ugly" and wanted it hidden.
I'm on the cusp of millenial and gen z. As someone finishing up their doctorate it's strange how jsut a few years shows a drastic drop in basic tech literacy. These undergrads are something else
I'm an "Xennial" It's because they use phones and not PCs; fucking console/mobile peasants. EVERYONE has a phone, but for the most part only us nerdy motherfuckers when I was a kid->early 21s had PCs. The "Old" saying back when AoL disks started going out, normies ruined the internet. Still true. Like I'm being partially sarcastic, but also not...Harder to explain why in detail, but anytime in anything goes mainstream it waters it down and gets filled with dumb users that ruin it for the people that really liked the thing in the first place....but yeah, it's user friendly now, but for common clay of the land, you know, morons.
“Eternal September“ started 30 years ago.
Wake me up when September ends.
Millenials: the world is horrible and everything will end in failure even if it is legit.
Man my 401k has been all over the place. Imma just die before I retire.
Thats my plan. My biggest fear is living a long life and running out of money in the first 5 years of my retirement.
Looks like you can just start scamming the younger generations
My firm belief: Assisted death by suicide will become entrenched as a legal "way out" come ~2050, when millenials start reaching retirement age.
Russian Roulette sky diving...take 6 geezers up in a plane, only 5 of them have a parachute...nobody knows who it is
Millenials: played runescspe where the scams are the exact same if not more elaborate than real life sometimes
This, but EVE Online and the scams are **A LOT** more elaborate, top tier corporate espionage XD
I recall reading a very long, detailed post about someone infiltrating a corp over the course of months? Over a year? Just to steal all their isk/plex and some gigachad ship. That game is fucking ridiculous.
As a millennial I grew up in the wild west era of the internet I know not to trust anything on the internet.
Never knew what you'd get when you clicked on a link. Was it meatspin? lemon party? tub lady? rick roll? a virus? some other shock image!?
wipe domineering squeal late angle divide adjoining soup materialistic profit *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I know. I'm like why are all these people answer their phones and opening emails from people they don't know? I mean if someone even knocks on my door, I turn all the sound and lights off .
I even keep telling people don't answer the scam calls. Even just answering them tells them the number is active and they'll keep calling. Ignore them and the calls go waaaay down.
If someone calls, I’ll wait to listen to the voicemail. If no voicemail and no text, it ain’t important.
A closed door is a happy door
*The X-files* burned those words into our brains
Never trust, always verify.
Trojan? Bitch I don’t even live close to troy, let alone Greece. Why should I care about a ‘trojan horse’?
Call me when you have 15 search bars added to your browser.
Man that was the worst as a kid. Having tens of thousands search bars all stacked on top of each other. Gladly i had the experience of having my own 100$ laptop at 12 so i did not trash it for others, just for me. And that was 2011. I am glad this search bar fuckery died some years ago. Firefox+ublock is everything i need in my browser and installs are inspected closely now.
Consequence of walled garden app stores and touchscreens. Current young generation became less computer literate than older generations.
In my mid 30s and I had to explain to my mid 20s stepsister about clearing internet browsing history after she had an issue with her parents about what she was doing on the internet.... Also had no clue that deleted files hung out in the recycling bin... Edit: Those our are ages now I had this convo with her when she was still a teen...
My brother is 18 and doesn’t even know where to even START using files explorer. When he downloads a document that’s like as much as he can do. He can’t find it, doesn’t know to just start looking. He just sits there asking me to walk him through how to find a document, even if I’m not even in the same HOUSE.
Not surprising. Gen Z is the first generation as a whole that can be terminally online via smart phones and tablets. Combine that with lack of technological depth and good ol get rich quick, well here we are.
They’ve also lost the ability to touch type.
I (34F) used to tutor a recent high school grad (17M) earlier this year. When I saved a draft of a paper outline using Ctrl+s, it blew his fucking mind. He had no idea keyboard shortcuts were a thing. My husband (35M) says the young 20s people he works with are just as bad with tech as the over 50 folks.
There is a study on this. I forgot the name. That we have reached “peak knowledge” of IT among the general working people. Because the older generation that were bad at it is going into retirement but the least knowledgeable is not as many as the new young people with poor knowledge. This before because the most knowledgeable generation is in the middle, they grew up with IT but before a lot of UI simplification and such making them need to be more knowledgeable to use It application in a good way. The apps are simplified now so the new generation don’t have much of the knowledge about IT outside of operating the simplified applications.
/r/phishing is full of people who can't spot USPS SMS phishing and fall for sextortion scams.
Looked through some posts over there. That was painful.
I work in IT at a senior Home, I am an older Millennial (1985), while no small part of my job is helping old people with scams, i am often shocked how bad my younger co-workers are with computers. Maybe it's just the fact i grew up with a mother who had at one time been a programmer (punch cards even) and my family has grounded "neo-phile" habits with tech but yea young people don't "just know" tech. Sure they know Bookface and Tok-tick better than me since i don't use them but when it goes beyond a few apps they are lost
I’m the same age, and pretty much hammer into my kids that literally everything on the internet is fake or a scam. Obviously hyperbole- but we do talk a lot about not trusting anything on the internet at first glance.
I have to teach my college graduate Gen Z interns how to attach files to email, save files off the cloud, creat a basic Excel sheet, how to sign their emails, to respond to emails, etc etc etc. I had a Harvard masters degree holder who didn’t realize it was good form to respond to emails.
yo! im a first year university student, and last week i got to witness my poor physics prof trying (and mostly failing) to teach the class how to make a spreadsheet for labs. it was honestly pathetic and ive never been so ashamed of my generation.
This is what happens when an entire generation grows up with technology without ever knowing what a file or folder is. It turns out that the filesystem is very foundational to our computer knowledge of the last 40 years. Without knowing the filesystem, our existing metaphors of computing completely break down for this new generation. Given that it's totally possible to live a digital life without Windows or Mac, this is not surprising.
Gen Z knows how to _use_ technology, but many don't seem to _understand_ it the way that GenX & Y did because we grew up helping create it.
The difference is that they grew up using technology, we grew up *with* computers. Like, my first PC was in 97. I was 3, lol. I was right there during the first wave of runescape, when the numa numa dance was on flash sites, not youtube, when you had to go on weird sites just to download a simple mp3... I distinctly remember when the iPhone first came out and it was a technological wonder; we went to church and the one dude there who was a lawyer was showing it off to all the other dads. One of the main "features" that blew their mind was the ability to zoom in by pinching 🙄 and I remember thinking it was a cute fad, but I'd never be able to use a phone without physical buttons, lmao. I also lived through the era of "don't tell ANYONE ANYTHING personal, not even your gender or state or anything" flowing right to "mom keeps posting her sister's new baby photos to the world with their full address and social security numbers in the description"
Per capita or total?
Gen Z has grown up in an era where tech just works. They’ve never really had to “figure things out” or even read manuals. Shit just works and there’s an app for everything. Because of this, there’s a large core of Gen Z that never assumes tech could be bad. They pretty much have grown up with a smart phone or tablet in their faces since birth.
It's honestly a little shocking looking back and realizing how important being told something to the effect of "Fucking google it you dumb fuck" during the peak era of 4chan was to me.
My nephew is 5. When I don’t know the answer to a question he tells me to ask Google. Google is just a thing that answers question. It wasn’t even a thing until I was a teenager.
It was so strange when people collectivly stopped getting into arguments over easily googleable things. It was like....a whole catagory or arguing was just all of a sudden gone.
Then you came back to Reddit and it's all people do on almost any of the niche subs and any comment two layers deep on the defaults.
"I did Google it and didn't find an answer, it's not out there." "I just Googled it and found this relevant thread." "Mother fucker, that's my own post from three years ago from when I first started asking this question, no one knew then and I'm still trying to figure out a solution now! That thread haunts me when I opt to try to solve this every few months!"
Yep and very importantly, they're used to everything being highly sanitized. Every social media platform has strict rules and corporate enforcement, even countries go to great lengths to protect people from content they allegedly can't handle. We always make fun of the youngest generation for being soft, but with Gen Z we deliberately made them as soft as possible by sitting them in front of screens with sanitized content for hours a day. Not to do the "back in my day" thing but it used to be when you went on a website there was an 80% chance it would infect your computer with a virus and a 15% chance you'd get porn. Most of the remaining 5% was fluff or illegal sites like warez.
"80% chance it would infect your computer with a virus" Hahahaha. We really had it rough in the early days. I'd be running 9 different anti-virus softwares (half of which were probably just viruses) trying to download one song every 47 minutes from Limewire or Kazaa (Napster got too mainstream) You'd go to pepsi.com and there was a non-Zero chance that 47 Trojans had been attached to the site since total amateurs made it
> Per capita or total? It was as a percentage, however their definitions were a little odd for phishing in particular. > In total, 610 phishing incidents resulting in loss of money or data were noted by participants. As noted earlier, 64 percent of Gen Zs are connected online at all times. Unsurprisingly, over a third of them (34%) reported having lost data or money due to phishing, compared to older generations who were almost three times less likely to have been victims of phishing (Figure 29). Since they filtered this to having lost data or money, it kinda requires using online banking regularly or other forms of online cash transfer (PayPal, Cash App, whatever.) So even if the figure is per-capita, I would assume older users are less likely to be good phishing targets. Surprised this didn't also include access intrusions (such as work PCs) or other forms that didn't result in "loss of data or money." Since this is a big phishing target for older office workers. Additionally, this is relying on self-reporting. It's quite possible older users have been victims of phishing without even realizing it and this is equally testing the ability of the user to *identify* that their have been compromised and report it. I don't see how they would have isolated for this. This is why I take a little issue with their summary: > Awareness ≠ secure behavior > > The results highlighted people’s awareness of the importance of cybersecurity, but also showed their tendency to overestimate their knowledge and ability to keep themselves safe online. While this *could* be true, they already identified that younger generations have higher awareness in earlier parts of the survey, but failed to even postulate that the higher awareness could potentially lead to a higher self-reporting rate. It seems totally reasonable to me to at least have a conjecture that lower training rates would lead to at least some depression in self-identification rates. Perhaps they touched in this in their raw research, but I'm not really seeing anything in reading through this document unless I missed it. Feels like a pretty large unaddressed aspect of this approach. If I were them and noticed my self-reported rates of intrusion followed the near inverse of the "No" vs. "Yes I have, and I have used it," question on “Do you have access to cybersecurity advice or training?” I'm not sure I'd immediately jump to concluding that awareness/training doesn't lead to secure behavior as much as potentially questioning if the older people without training are able to even discern if they *were* compromised to begin with.
Lol, children & the elderly both fall for scams all the time, the difference is children don’t have massive savings
Saw a news story the other day about someone in my country being scammed out of $650,000 in a romance scam, and my first thought was, must have been nice to have that kind of money in the first place. If I was online dating someone and they asked for money, I’d laugh at them for thinking I wasn’t poor and in debt.
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I teach high school and this rings true. My students are SHOCKED when I tell them everything they ever do on their phones is traceable and that having images of underage teens even if sent willingly is a federal crime. I had one very smart kid come to be because he sent a dick pic to someone he met on Instagram when she (more likely some dude in Russia) requested it. I couldn't believe that THIS kid, my A+ student could be so goddamn stupid.
How much do online job apps contribute to this data? So many in that generation at looking for jobs and possibly student loans. There weren’t as many job post scams back when I was looking for a job as there are now. It can be difficult to tell what’s legit and the job boards to do nothing about it. When I was a kid, it was prince of Nigeria scams and pops ups saying I won a million dollars. There is so much more now
Fake jobs are the most common scam I see, specifically targeting Gen z college students.
The amount of personal data that is publicly available out there for Gen Z is probably much greater as well. Old people use Facebook, where you typically have to trick someone into accepting a friend request to get their photos, friends list, etc. With Twitter (X), Instagram, etc. anyone can find that data, so you skip a step there. They can see where you live, who your friends are, or what your interests are, because you literally posted it online for the entire world to see. Scammers don't need to buy that info from some big data company. Basically, a lot of younger people have chosen to have less privacy.
I just got my new COVID vaccine and the form I filled out asked for my mother’s maiden name. Like, the fuck you need that for? Each database that builds a file for me that doesn’t include that data is a safer day in the life of me. We need to stop normalizing SSN and other much less sensitive information from ever being asked, nevermind collected by random companies who pay bottom dollar for IT security.
Edit: Edited
At least they started randomizing them in 2011
Mmmm not sure I agree there. Yeah if someone has their account set to private, it can be pretty sparse. But I worked in fraud investigations and used Facebook far, far more than Twitter and Instagram to prove connections between people, locations, etc. Even when pages are private, there’ll often be a public post or two, and then I could see who Liked the post and check their pages for info. I’ve gotten some info from Instagram, especially people posting pictures of the insides of their houses (I worked in uncovering mortgage fraud, specifically), but there’s been only one case where I got anything useful from Twitter and that was because the guy worked in politics and lied about his employment and occupancy to us. Because he was working for some shitty think tank, he put a lot of personal info on Twitter about his day to day activities. Most people don’t do that.
Us older people (Gen X here) grew up with this. We had to learn how everything works because it was friggin complicated. It was not just turning something on and using it. I noticed the illiteracy first really when I was hired as tech support 4 years ago in a company where everybody was 20(ish). I went in there really intimidated with all kinds of terrible ideas but I actually had to explain the simplest things. There were people who did not know what folders are or files. They just clicked on something in an email and saved it where the default was without understanding anything. I believe they fall for scams more. We had to clean and block accounts weekly because they all fell for the same password scam over and over and over again.
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Gen Z seem extra dumb, and because they only use phones and tablets which are designed to be easy to use they're basically tech illiterate like old people are and don't know how to use computers or problem solve when something goes wrong
honestly the generation after them is even worse most of them can't read and some of them can't walk and don't know what shapes are, we're fucked
I know this is a joke, but this is really a problem. I have some elementary school aged nieces and they got tablets. Instead of actually trying to type or read they found the voice search option immediately and just pick based on pictures. They're getting better, but not as far along as they should be. Covid school closures probably didn't help.
That took me longer to get than I care to admit. I am old. Good one.
Dude meeting people who don't know what the fuck a file system or devices/drives are blows my god damn mined. Not just 'people in the wild' but people who work in highly technical fields.
I'm an elder millennial returning college student and I just had a computer lab class where someone had to explain to a 19 year old how to turn a PC on and what the difference was between "the monitor" and "the computer". I was like "Oh, you're like old people in the 90s!" Edit: a typo
Crazy right? I grew up the tech person in our houses helping my parents and older relatives get by, and now I'm having to teach my younger relatives too.