It would start by taking an honest assessment of what the other person actually knows before you make blanket statements about what they don't know. I mean, don't get me wrong I'm not personally insulted, but in my case you have zero idea what my actual expertise is but you're already telling me that retrieving link is beyond what I can safely handle -- and you literally have no idea what my experience is. (I used to work in security!) Part of my job as a developer is security, I need to know attack vectors people use, so that sites I build aren't vulnerable, and besides that, I'm not some criminal mastermind but you don't even know if when I was younger I had fun hacking people and creating mischief. Point being, you can't come at people with this blanket statement of "you have no idea what you're dealing with!" because YOU don't know what they know. If you do that you're going to lose their empathy and attention before you even communicate what you want to communicate.
Here's what you can do: tell them what can go wrong, with specifics, and don't make assumptions about them. Be realistic about what the likely consequences are and what the worst case is.
If we wanted perfect security we'd never connect machines to the internet and superglue the usb ports shut. But in a realistic world, the level of security we choose is measure against how much risk we're willing to take. Lets say my risk profile is this: I don't work for the NSA and I'm not important enough that someone is going to try a unique zero day exploit on me. But it would be trivial to figure out my work email based on my linked in and my name, so I don't really care about them discovering deliver-ability. If the phishing attempt is bad, I'll probably spot it immediately and not bother to even open the email, but if it's good I'll probably at least investigate because I'll want to know if it was a legitimate email. Chances are, they're just trying to convince me to type my password into a web form (and assuming I use the same password everywhere). Of course, chances are also that, just based on my past experiences, about 90% of phishing attempts come from corporate security departments anyway. If someone really has a very clever zero day exploit of wget then they'll get access to a container with little sensitive data that I rebuild about a hundred times a day.
Yes it's not my hardware, but on the other hand, my company has entrusted me with local admin to get my work done and use of the internet. That's the risk profile they're comfortable with, and sometimes I get external emails and need to figure out if they are legit or not, and I don't work for a giant company with a huge security department so sometimes I need to take a glance to see if it's a legit email or not.
That's an excellent and highly empathetic approach!
My only issue with what you've described is that I cannot scale it. When I have hundreds of developers to educate, sitting down with each of them and spending hours hashing out what they do and don't know and educating them over the gaps can at times become somewhat time-consuming.
How do I deal with hundreds of developers, the vast majority of whom have no significant background in security, many of whom earnestly and honestly believe that their understanding of web development protects them? How do I collectively treat them like adults and not lose their empathy or attention in a scalable way? A highly individualized approach isn't workable in this context.
Here's what you can do: tell them what can go wrong, with specifics, and don't make assumptions about them. Be realistic about what the likely consequences are and what the worst case is.
If we wanted perfect security we'd never connect machines to the internet and superglue the usb ports shut. But in a realistic world, the level of security we choose is measure against how much risk we're willing to take. Lets say my risk profile is this: I don't work for the NSA and I'm not important enough that someone is going to try a unique zero day exploit on me. But it would be trivial to figure out my work email based on my linked in and my name, so I don't really care about them discovering deliver-ability. If the phishing attempt is bad, I'll probably spot it immediately and not bother to even open the email, but if it's good I'll probably at least investigate because I'll want to know if it was a legitimate email. Chances are, they're just trying to convince me to type my password into a web form (and assuming I use the same password everywhere). Of course, chances are also that, just based on my past experiences, about 90% of phishing attempts come from corporate security departments anyway. If someone really has a very clever zero day exploit of wget then they'll get access to a container with little sensitive data that I rebuild about a hundred times a day.
Yes it's not my hardware, but on the other hand, my company has entrusted me with local admin to get my work done and use of the internet. That's the risk profile they're comfortable with, and sometimes I get external emails and need to figure out if they are legit or not, and I don't work for a giant company with a huge security department so sometimes I need to take a glance to see if it's a legit email or not.