business email

You are working as the administrative assistant to the communications VP of a medium-sized publicly held company. Your boss is busy most of the time, so you find yourself handling many of the emails that go to employees from your office.

This week you have a real challenge. The IT department has become increasingly concerned about the possibility that phishing emails will get past the company firewall and other security features. They are concerned that some employees--who are not aware of how dangerous phishing emails can be--will click links in those emails and allow malware or other dangerous programs to infect the corporate IT system.

Recently, the IT department sent a phony phishing email to all employees and tracked the individuals who clicked the links in the emails. The IT department assumes that these individuals could well endanger the entire company's system. "If they were willing to click the phony phishing email," the VP of Information Systems says, "then they will probably click a link in a genuine phishing email and endanger us all."

Your boss has asked you to draft two emails. The first email is going to all the employees who clicked the link in the phony phishing emails. These people need to be alerted to the fact that they could have caused problems for the company's entire system and warned not to do it again.

The second email is going to all employees, alerting them to the risk of responding to anything that looks like a phishing email and asking them to forward anything suspicious to the IT department. You may or may not choose to mention the phony phishing email that was sent recently.

Good luck with this one.