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Phishing for Credit
An anonymous reader writes "Two graduate students at Indiana University conducted a phishing study to
determine how readily students will give up personal information if
the phishing emails appear to come from close friends. Using only
publicly available
information, they sent out emails to students asking them to click a
link that required username/password information. Needless to say,
the study has generated lots of attention on campus. The student
newspaper has the story
and the researchers have created a blog where the participants can vent."
They will be pressed with charges even though they had good intentions compared to hardly anyone getting caught with malicious intentions.
But some students are upset they were involved in the study without their consent or knowledge. Senior Rebecca Shakespeare did not even know she had been used as a sender until her friend notified her.
"I was frustrated that I was hearing from a friend that my e-mail account was sending her things," Shakespeare said. "I had no idea where it was coming from. I was irritated because I was concerned that my home system was being abused."
Shakespeare called University Information Technology Services, which said it could have been a virus and to not click on the link.
"I've spent a lot of time keeping my (computer) secured," Shakespeare said. "I feel kind of used that it was the University that was making my friends think I had opened up my system to viruses."
If that's really why they're concerned, well, maybe they'd be interested in knowing that the vast majority of virus/malware type things that send email in this fashion still don't originate from the computer of the person in question anyway...therefore, this whole rationale for worry is BS, since spoofed email can come from *anywhere*, and it's most often NOT your own computer.
And - make no mistake, I really do see their point - but the IT resources belong to the university, and neither the university nor the researchers uses the person's account or any password or other credentials belonging to the person. It was simply a spoofed "from" address; nothing more. And if it's strictly "legal" for any random person to spoof a from address, it's just as legal for the purposes of research, whose findings may provide some level of insight on *protecting* people from malicious phishing.
Now, I personally don't know whether any of this justifies doing the study in the way they did. That's a judgment call. If the university's IT organization proper is doing it, that's one thing, and I could see people being uncomfortable with the motivations. But grad students? I don't see any problem with that at all. In fact, they don't need anyone's permission to do what they did. However, in good faith, they did get the approval of the Human Subjects Committee.
They did nothing wrong!!
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
That regardless of the intent, this sort of conduct is at the very least considered immoral and possibly bordering on illegality. It sounds like fraud to me. Simply posing as someone else to get certain private information seems innocent enough if the goal is to warn their fellow students of their vulnerability to social engineering, since the weakest link in computer security is the person. I would imagine they are going to feel some heat from the university at the very least for this, though.
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That people would be a little more mature about this; viruses and other malicious software can (and often do) get sent from friends' email addresses (how many viruses are there that read someone's Outlook Address Book?) I think people are being a little naive.
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
This reminds me of old debate about requiring a license to use the internet. The pros being obvious: stupid/ignorant people would not be allowed to open viruses any longer, etc. The cons being that the internet is currently a free, open medium with few restrictions on what can be said/shown.
Graah! Why is the solution to everyone's problem with academia "fire the professor"? Your analogy to robbing a bank is a false one; nothing was actuallly stolen in this project. I think you, and a lot of other people, are overreacting.
Going back to school for entry-level jobs?
I think it's good to let students (future scientists, decicion makers etc...) feel what it means to be part of socially constructed fraud... Mainly because this will get worse and worse over time, you see how many database leaks with high profile personal data have taken place lately. People have to learn ways around all this identity theft, the only way is to confront them with the consequenses of this all.
A lot of the comments on the blog, complained that the study was unethical because the participants didnt know they were part of the study.
My two reasons why I think it couldnt have been done any other way.
1. This study focuses on deception and how people react when they are decived.
2. Telling the participants they were a part of a study or asking them to be part of it, would effect the behavior of the participants and therefore changing the study results.
As long as the information was not used in any illegal way. Then I don't find a problem with how this expirement was conducted. Yes it sucks to get phished, but its better to be fished by these guys than the hundreds of other phishers who are out there to turn phising into finacial gain.
In America we are imprisoned by our fear of them.
I know this is going off topic, but this reminds me of the LSD studies the CIA did in the late 70's.
Except there's a large line between giving someone chemicals that could very easily be toxic, or at least cause significant health problems, and seeing if people will input private data that the study authors won't use anyway.
And disciplining the professor or the students in this instance is absolutely insane. The entire point of having an "Human Subjects Committee" oversight board is to allow the university to make these kinds of decisions. Furthermore, I'm still not clear what they did that would qualify as illegal. If spoofing email addresses is a serious crime, there's a lot more people that should be in jail (and it would be massively easier to convict spammers); it's likely that phishing for personal data is only illegal if you actually collect the data, which it appears they didn't (it did a check to see if it was valid, but they don't indicate that the password itself was saved).
Do some students feel used? Sure... but there doesn't seem to be any real harm done, and it's impossible to actually get an idea of how to deal with the problem of real phishing attempts if you can't get a sense of how many normal people actually fall for what types of things.
Your analogy to robbing a bank is a false one; nothing was actuallly stolen in this project.
Something was stolen from the unwitting student/participants. They lost their ignorance of the sad state of the internet's infrastructure. This "experiment" created a harsh wake-up call that e-mail is not a trustworthy medium.
SMTP was never designed for an open environment with untrustworthy users. It was designed for collegial academic networks with funding from people that run closed military networks.
Why is the solution to everyone's problem with academia "fire the professor"
I agree 100%, but shooting the messenger is an age-old solution. People prefer a comforting falsehood (email is trustworthy) to a harsh reality.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
That could easily be said for other experiments that have been challenged on ethical grounds. Sometimes experiments find things about ourselves we'd rather not know.
For example, the Milgram experiement, where participants were mildly coerced by an authoritative person to administer strong electrical shocks to a subject (who was really an actor). A high proportion of the participants were willing to administer levels of shock that they believed to be lethal.
Would you like to know that you would be capable of murder as long as someone else was there to take the responsibility/blame? Even if the person in the quoted blog post should feel foolish, that does not make the experiment ethical and non-offensive - quite the opposite.
and I object most strenuously to being associated with what sounds like the noisiest bunch of whining idiots in recent memory.
:)
Unethical? Possibly -- in the current "enlightened" academic environment where definition of terms is often left to whom screams loudest I suppose that one or more of these embarrassed campus inhabitants has enough functioning brain cells to come up with a completely irrelevant but intensely self-referrential definition which supports their childish outrage. It's highly delusional but they're obviously still children and I don't suppose we can expect actual coherent thought from them until they grow up.
Invasion of privacy"? Drugs must be a significant problem at IU. It always was known as a party school, and this is just more evidence that the description contains some accuracy. And to think that these students are often described as the "best and brightest" and the next generation of leaders. Kinda provides some background for current events, doesn't it?
Rb
It seems their primary complaint is that, GASP, "evil" email looked like it was coming from people they know. WAKE THE HELL UP PEOPLE!!! All the Slammer and Melissa viruses (and their mutated children) DO THE SAME THING: they scan through the address books of their victims, rewrite the "From" line to be one name in the address book, and then write the "To" line to be you (whose name is also in the address book) -- and then there's a good chance that you'll then know the person's name in the "From" line, which (it is hoped) makes you let your guard down and open the infected attachment.
I'll bet $1028 that 90% of the whiners there have been infected by these viruses in the past, and probably still are. And now they've been fooled a second time the same way. How does that old expression go again?
When I find some sympathy these whiners, I'll let them know...
Moral of the day: If you're going to emulate something evil in a research context you get the damn permission and cover your arse first
Sneaky Solution: Slip an agreement into the campus network AUP that lets the "IT security office" carry out 'various surveys, tests and research to help improve campus security and promote awareness of security related issues that may effect students. All IT security office studies follow our strict <a href="PP-url-goes-here">privacy policy</a>'. Most students sign an AUP and if they don't read it, then that becomes their problem.
The article seems to indicate that only the FROM part of the emails were phony. The links actually point to the school's server, and no valuable information was recorded, i.e. the passwords were not recorded by some other server. They were given permission only to gain information that was already in the public circle, and they only gathered email addresses which are probably available to anyone from the school's website.
get a free laptop
It is truly astonishing what is publicly available. We should all be more careful about what we let others know about us,
He makes this extremely good point some ways into the article. People are so gullilble. They're like Pavlov's dogs who salivate every time they see or hear the word "free", or come across anything that has some kind of "deal" attached to it. After the "I got something for free" rush wears off, the actual cost can be quite substantial.
I've managed to confound some people at a local specialty store- three times now they've offered me the opportunity to fill out a "deal" card, where they track your purchases. After a certain number, you get a small quantity of the same product for free. I've declined every time. It's just not worth it.
Granted, you have to be a little stupid to actually enter your name/pwd in a site just because you received an e-mail.
But what about pranks?
It's easy to create an email that looks legitimate and send it as another person... You only need your regular email software. Even more if you actually know both people.
For example, when I was studying (4 years ago), we used to email with some teachers.
One guy sent a mail to another, posing as the teacher, telling him his test or assignment (I don't remember) was bad.
Not everybody has the time to check mail headers and verify the identity of the sender (and even that can be spoofed). Until we move to an all-signed email world, we're stuck with this.