GoDaddy is the largest domain service provider in the world. Recently, the company sent out a Christmas holiday bonus email to its employees with a token of USD $650. This email was actually a phishing test disguised as a gift, to check whether the employees were smart enough to differentiate the truth from the lie.

The employees received an email from [email protected] with the subject line – “GoDaddy Holiday Party”. This definitely got a number of employees excited as they couldn’t believe for once that they would be put to a test. Since it was within the company, the chances of a phishing test were less. The email encouraged the reader to celebrate with the company for its Holiday party and provided them the incentive of USD $650. Who wouldn’t jump to the occasion?

Check out this screenshot below?

Seems legit right?

Unfortunately, over 500 employees opened this mail and received another mail just days later which wrote – “You’re getting this mail because you failed our phishing test”. Not the right kind of gift anyone would want at the end of 2020!

This was followed by another Security Awareness Social Engineering Training that got the employees absolutely disgusted. They found it to be insensitive, especially because it came during the holiday season instead of a regular day in the year. All these employees also reported against the company and its insensitive practice during the Christmas season, however, GoDaddy has still not made a comment about the situation or apologized to its employees.

In this pandemic, GoDaddy has seen a huge growth in its customer base. It surpassed the mark of 20 million customers! That is a huge number for the world’s largest domain hosting portal. However, the company has also had to lay off quite a few of its employees.

What do you think about this gimmick in the name of a gift?

Source: Business Insider