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People Suck at Spotting Phishing
JohnGrahamCumming writes "Initial results at SpamOrHam.org show that people don't fare well when trying to spot spams and phishes. This blog entry shows some actual spams and phishes that people fell for, as well as genuine messages that they think are spam." The thing about these s[cp]ams is that they must work sometimes. When I see the messages, I can't fathom 'how'.
At what point in history was this not a problem? Can't say I'm surprised...
- For every action, there is an equal and opposite criticism.
While it would be nice if there was a test or three that a person was required to take in order to do anything online... the fact that anyone is able to buy a PC and plug it into the internet means that there are a lot of... uninformed people out there.
It's the same group that replies to spam messages asking to be removed, purchase from spammers and leaves their PC's connected 24/7 without spending anytime to patch it.
So long as these people exist, nothing should be a surprise as to the effectiveness of phishing and other such areas.
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
I've seen more sophisticated phishing examples by far, and some are indistinguishable from what might be the real thing. The distinguishing factor from a genuine missive is the best phishes have links to bogus addresses (sometimes denoted with only an IP address), and the destination site asks for information company's won't ask for from an e-mail.
One of the best phishes I've seen was sent to me -- it was ostensibly from my phone company, and it described a problem with my on-line bill pay (I don't). The letter was nicely formatted with the colors and icons of my phone company. The link was a giveaway, when I rolled over it, I could see the IP address, not a phone company web-site.
I researched this a bit more, went to my phone company's web site, and downloaded their graphics. A bit-for-bit comparison of their icons, etc., and the phishers showed them to be identical. (Interestingly, this puts phishers also in the position of being guilty of more crime: copyright violations.)
Had my suspicions not been raised by the fact I wasn't participating in on-line bill pay and the phish indicated that problem, and had I not seen the IP address by rolling over the link (which I only did because of above suspicion), I easily could have been convinced I was dealing with a real e-mail (NOTE: this was two years ago, before phishing had become real big, and it was my first incident.)
I can easily believe many, if not most could fall for well crafted phishing expeditions. I would agree with the cited article, those are weak examples unlikely to catch savvy users (though they still could catch the naive, of which there are millions!). (And, I would claim some of the examples really are nothing more than SPAM.)
...there is no patch for human stupidity.
Most users just don't know better, despite best efforts to educate them otherwise, or make the scams obviously fradulent. Ever seen that 'MSN will never ask you for your password!' type banner on things? Know how many people retain it? Very few.
Informatus Technologicus
He finds it strange that people called that message from "Keith" to be spam... but the thing is, if you have no idea who "Keith" is, it probably IS spam... and if you do know him, you probably would not mark it as such.
The same goes for the US Airways thing. Yeah, it's an example of "not spam", but if you haven't recently bought a US Airways ticket, then the save bet would be that it is.
Oh... and the nun joke is fucking hilarious. That alone made TFA worth reading.
Information wants to be anthropomorphized.
TFA seems to be using a funny definition of spam.
Most would say it's unsolicited commercial junk mail, but he seems to think it means "phony" email. Apparently he doesn't mind receiving weekly airfare specials containing choice bits like "BID FOR TICKETS TO THE BIG GAME IN THE BIG EASY!"
Also re phishing: I'd say paypal is largely at fault for this. They do (did?) send an awful lot of useless mail full of clickable links - they were just begging to get phished because people were so used to receiving authentic but useless clickable mail from them. None of my other banks have done this (although one sends a fair amount of crap not specific to my account - rates and such).
So what if someone thinks a legitimate email from a bank is a phishing scam? Banks shouldn't be using email for anything serious because it makes their customers more susceptible to fraud. If people expect to receive legitimate and sensitive communications from their bank via email, it's that much easier to fall for it.
For example, I got one this morning talking about my home loan account with a large bank I don't have an account with. I know it's a phishing scam just from the From and Subject lines. However, if my own bank sent an email talking about my actual mortgage, I'd treat it in exactly the same way. There's no benefit to giving an email the benefit of the doubt. If there is something my bank needs from me, they can send a letter and I'll go to my local branch to take care of it in person.
Let's say I handed you an entire crate of auto parts, and told you that some of them may be genuine parts, while others might be knockoffs. I give you a whole binder, filled with instructions on how to differentiate between all the different "good" and "bad" parts. Some of these knockoffs are obvious fakes; others are quite cleverly done, requiring you to check for minute details such as whether or not inner surfaces are well-polished, or subtle discrepancies in serial number schemes and product logos.
At what point do you just start winging it? After one day of studious sifting? After a week? A month? When you see a part that you're pretty sure is genuine, but would need to haul out the manual for ten minutes' worth of cross-checking part and serial number ranges to confirm this--at what point do you simply go with your gut?
When somebody who knows what they're doing goes about trying to hoodwink your typical individual, it can be very hard for the individual to know when they're being hoodwinked, even if they know they might be being hoodwinked. It's part of human nature--there's a point at which you just throw your hands in the air and grant your trust to an unknown entity, because it's too tedious or time-consuming to check everything out. Given the average person--heck, even a person who knows a fair amount about the subject--there'll be a point where they just take the damn part and have it installed in their car, because they just want to be done with it and get on with their life. It's the same thing with phishing--unless you're one of those few individuals who has fairly advanced knowledge on the subject, you're eventually going to give up and make a gut-reaction decision to whether or not you "trust" the email you just got, simply because it's more trouble than it's worth to actually dig through it.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
For pete's sake people, if you have to show genuine emails, try at leat to sanitize them a little. Some of the 'ham' emails shown still have the full contact information, including the original email address. That's what I call dangerous!
If you don't believe me, go to the web site, and try classifying some emails... You'll see what I mean...
The right to offend is far more important than the right not to be offended. (Rowan Atkinson)
I treat all of those emails as a phishing attempt. If I think it has the possibility of being legit, I type in the appropriate web address (no, I don't cut-n-paste, I type in the previous login site), login and verify the contents.
I still don't understand how someone with a modicum of common sense would EVER reply to an email or populate a Web site with information from someone or an organization they do not know.
If I were the banks, which are the biggest targets for phisphing, I would run commercials duting primetime TV stating that "we never send out emails asking for your personal inforation". While this would not reach everyone, it would be a start. Security, however, is not a money maker, it's an expenditure. Banks will continue to only run commercials extolling their wonderful features.
Ever notice the commercials that sell drugs? What the hell is wrong with American medicine? Ever notice that none of these commercials or medical professionals ever talks about fixing the root cause? They only talk about the symptoms. Security is the same thing. Let's fix the root cause instead of treating the symptoms. Education of the populace would go a long way towards cutting down on phishing.
Stop using HTML or convert it plain text and it's hard not to spot a phish.
UNIX/Linux Consulting
I conduct almost all of my business online and I don't think this is necessary.
I am never, ever asked for a password or identifying information via email. At least never by the legitimate company.
And I never click a link in an email. If my bank/company wants me to update my information, I type their website URL by hand into Firefox, log into my account section, and do what I need to do.
It basically comes down to this: Don't click links in email.
This one basic rule really does solve 99.999% of all scam problems, while allowing you to conduct business online safely.
In other news, 50% of people have below-average intelligence.
Jokes about statistics aside, people falling for phishing is our fault. Our fault as in our industry's fault.
We've spent so long training our parents, help-desk clients, and other tech-stupid creatures that the way to respond to mysterious dialog boxes is to "Just click OK!" that at this stage the damage is essentially permanent.
Their natural instinct was to treat computers with suspicion, and we beat it out of them.
Yay for us.
The weight of getting the word out about these things to the average user is going to need to lay on someone, probably ISPs. It should be one of their responsibilities to attempt to keep their users safe. We can educate people about some of the basics, watching out for links that are just IPs and etc (and thunderbird already has some features regarding this), but some of the higher level checks need to be done automatically by software.
But no matter how sophisticated filtering technology gets, the numer of ways that data can be manipulated and the sheer volume of traffic means that some of these things are going to get through. And while extra IQ points don't automatically confer amazing powers, they might allow people to become more suspicious of something that doesn't "look quite right."
We've been educating people from the mid-60s on that smoking is deleterious to their health. Has smoking ceased? No. In that case, it's the addicition to nicotine and the idea that smoking someone cool (ever kiss a smoker? Yuck!). In the case of email, I'd be willing to bet the vast majority of folks who click on these links in phishing emails are: 1) paranoid types, who have so bought into the identity theft idea they can't stand the thought that someone may be stealing their identity, 2) people who have little sophistication in general and virtually none in the world of PCs and the Internet, 3) greedy people, who thin that they'll just fire off a few hundred dollars of their hard-earned money and some friendly guy in Nigeria will make them rich, or 4) lonely folks who just want to talk to someone or feel a part of something.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
EVERY serious site has a disclaimer stating they will NOT ask you for your details by email. EVERY scam involves them sending an email asking for your details.
In the early days, yes. Now, many phishers have wised up. They'll send you a phish that, save for one or two links, looks absolutely legitimate. You click the link, it sends you to a page at ebay.verification-department.com that mimics an actual eBay login page. You'll "log in", then they'll welcome you and very professionally gather your information--all, of course, after you've "logged in" to their system.
You can't cheat a honest man
Oh, you most certainly can. Just 'cause something rolls off the tongue nicely doesn't mean it's true.
and you can't phis a person who thinks.
Again, we're talking about attrition and trust. Unless you have a quite solid understanding of what phishing is, how to identify it, and how to go about avoiding it, you're going to eventually just trust something that looks legitimate enough. It's simply not feasible to expect that every single user of email will have enough technical know-how to identify and avoid getting phished.
You've got telephone slamming, you've got phishing, you've got insurance fraud, you've got pyramid schemes, you've got con artists--if we were all simply smart enough to know a rat when we saw one, none of these would be a problem. The problem is that many, many people have ductile minds and want to trust other people. If you're somebody who is willing to cheat another person out of their money, odds are that you'll eventually nail somebody. It's attrition, plain and simple--eventually, people simply let their guard down, even if only for a moment.
Obliteracy: Words with explosions
Rule 1: It's almost certainly not legit, before you even look.
Rule 2: If it seems legit, then go to your browser and manually go to the institution's website and log in normally, do not use hotlinks provided in any email.
My rule 1 used to be just "it's not legit" - none of my financial institutions EVER contacted me via email up until about 6 months ago. Now they do, so I've modified it a bit.
You'd think people would get a BIT of a clue from the fact that, like me, they must be getting very valid-looking emails from places that they don't even have accounts with. You'd think that would tell them something.
unfortunately, there are problems with that as well - there are some legit sites that will redirect you off of their main domain, sometimes even to an IP address. Insane? Yes. But it happens. So for people who actually DO know what the hell they're doing, the problem isn't phishes that look like real sites, it's real sites that look like phishes.
John Graham-Cumming says that the Travelocity email at the bottom of the his blog essay "really is a genuine message from Travelocity and not a spam."
I beg to differ. I have no problem believing that it "really is a genuine message from Travelocity."
But spam doesn't mean "phony," it means "unsolicited commercial email." (And in my own opinion that includes "unknowingly 'solicited' commercial email.")
In order for Graham-Cumming or anyone else to say that Travelocity email is not spam, they would need to know whether it was solicited. You can't tell by any examination of the message itself.
If it was actively solicited by someone specifically checking a box requesting to be notified of offers, then, sure, it's not spam. If it was opt-out spam with the opt-out option hidden... or implicit... then it darn well is spam.
Mostly likely this particular email is in a grey area... quite likely an opt-out was plainly visible, but needed to be actively chosen, at some point in the travel booking process where a customers thoughts are likely to be elsewhere (where IS that security code on the back of my credit card?).
But it is absolutely wrong to stay that the Travelocity message is "not spam," just because it is really from Travelocity
Spam is spam, even if it is a genuine email from a reliable company informing me of some truly valuable opportunity... _if I didn't ask the company to send me those emails._
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
'You know how dumb the average person is? Half of 'em are dumber than that.' Remember, just using computers does not mean someone's got a brain. You only have to work in tech support read some of the many internet message boards to realize that.
Get the picture? Jack of all trade, master of none. Or so goes the old saying. Most of us are good at something. Some could even be called brilliant. I've even met a few people who are very good a most things. I've not yet met one who is good at everything. Not one. I've heard what some of them call some very smart IT people behind their back as well. They call some of *us* idiots because of how well we understand *their* fields.
Seems to me the ones who make it biggest in the IT sector, will be the ones who understand this and can help the people who don't understand computers the best. But then again, those are usually the ones who understand what ROI is and how it affects their jobs, and can actually tell the boss/client why the proposed project should *not* be done. The ones who understand that the person who fell victim to phishing speaks a whole new language that most computer geeks don't understand, just like we speak one they don't.
I expect that this is not a recent phenomenon, nor is it going away anytime soon. Con artists have been around for a very long time. I make the humble sugestion that you vent in here, but for your own sake, please please please don't take it into the work place. It's extremely dangerous to yourself. When perceived as having a negative attitude, most people don't make it far.
funarcadeonline.com
The problem is that while con men target idiots directly like snipers, phishers and spammers pull out a machine gun and mow down everyone on the street.
You might be smart enough not to lose your shirt to a con artist, but if a new one knocks on your door every five minutes, you're going to be pretty damn annoyed.
Based on your numbers, that would mean that 95% of the people on the internet should not be on the internet to begin with. There should really be some training required before you can run an internet connection to your computer.
Similarly, nobody should be allowed to drive unless they can name every part of the car and explain what its function is. Then, they shouldn't be allowed to take a car out onto any roads until they've studied civil engineering.
Really, the idea that everyone who uses a service should know what's going on inside the black box is just stupid.
"The use-mention distinction" is not "enforced here."