The life of a student worker at Phished
During the month of July, I did a content marketing internship at Phished. I wrote more than 200 phishing simulations and a few articles, learned all about cybersecurity and discovered a knack for predicting the future.
When I saw the internship offer at Phished, my first thought was that I was a victim of a scam myself. A company that phishes other organisations - it can't be true, can it? After some research, it turned out that the offer was legitimate and I realised how little I had learned about phishing at school or even university.
So my July assignments were more than just writing phishing emails. I also received a crash course in cyber security. I can now proudly add terms like phishing, smishing, vishing, social engineering and ISO certificates to my dictionary. Everyone should know these terms and take this crash course. When researching for articles, I have been surprised more than once by the number of victims of phishing every year and the money that hackers can make from it. This is not really surprising, as I soon realised that writing a phishing email does not take much time and is surprisingly fun.
Writing phishing emails about fake news in particular made me laugh out loud. You realise that nothing is impossible: Bart De Wever becomes a Dutchman, Trump goes to jail... Two of my emails even came true: Pukkelpop was cancelled and Van der Poel had a fall. Maybe I should consider a career as a fortune teller! I just hope that Queen Elizabeth doesn't die right away. Occasionally I felt a little guilty when I got redundancy emails or emails for a fake charity, but I soon realised that it was actually for a good cause and that the real hackers wouldn't mind either.
On top of that, there were also friendly colleagues who, with their experience, were always willing to help me. For such a young company, Phished works incredibly efficiently and professionally. Everyone is very passionate about their work, which contributes to a pleasant working atmosphere. Criticism or feedback was always given in a constructive way, which allowed me to learn something new every day. In addition, the work was very varied. For example, in my first week I was allowed to appear in a promotional film, which resulted - in the words of the operations manager, Frederik Van de Meulebroucke - in an 'Oscar-worthy' performance.
Joking aside, I have nothing but praise for my experience at Phished as a student. Thanks to great colleagues and beautiful premises, I enjoyed coming to work every day. I've learned more about copywriting and cybersecurity in the last month than I have in my entire life. From now on, every piece of mail I receive is suspect. And that's how it should be with everyone.
