The first company I worked for as a developer was like this, except worse.
We got hit with some Christmas virus. One of the devs was talking about how he had mistakenly clicked on the link, but nothing happened. We were at lunch and suddenly were all looking at each other like, "Dave, this isn't good!" told him to call support because we had all seen the emails from security to not click on any links in emails because so many of these were making the rounds.
They took his laptop, reimaged it and gave back to him. The funny part was the Outlook team disabled any links in any emails he got from then on. Not sure how they did it, but if you wanted to send him a link, you had to send it to his personal email or over one of his social media accounts. Any time he got a link, if it was for business, he would have to call support, open a ticket and then an hour later, they would send him the link to open.
It drove the guys nuts. He asked repeatedly to have them enable the links, but they basically told him once you were on the list, it was for good. He quit after four months and said one of the most infuriating things was security never allowing him to get off of the "naughty" list.
Wait... why was no one just sending the link as plain text? So he could just copy paste? Or like news[dot]ycombinator[dot]com/item?id=45532515
I guess this also begs the question why email clients don't have an option to dereference links or convert them to plain text? Like
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I mean at the end of the day links are a formatting thing, right? I know it doesn't solve url shorteners, but then url shorteners become suspect, at least until some internal person starts being dumb and suggesting them because urls are way too long[0].
[0] but this also mostly seems solvable if we are okay with redirects and temporary info being passed in the link. Redirects might be an issue, but at least getting redirected from an official site is better than getting redirected from some shortening service. Maybe a big part of the problem is how we've bundled in so much tracking info...[1]
We got hit with some Christmas virus. One of the devs was talking about how he had mistakenly clicked on the link, but nothing happened. We were at lunch and suddenly were all looking at each other like, "Dave, this isn't good!" told him to call support because we had all seen the emails from security to not click on any links in emails because so many of these were making the rounds.
They took his laptop, reimaged it and gave back to him. The funny part was the Outlook team disabled any links in any emails he got from then on. Not sure how they did it, but if you wanted to send him a link, you had to send it to his personal email or over one of his social media accounts. Any time he got a link, if it was for business, he would have to call support, open a ticket and then an hour later, they would send him the link to open.
It drove the guys nuts. He asked repeatedly to have them enable the links, but they basically told him once you were on the list, it was for good. He quit after four months and said one of the most infuriating things was security never allowing him to get off of the "naughty" list.