Dealing with Phishing

Apu writes "SecurityFocus has published an interesting interview with Rachna Dhamija, co-author of the paper 'Why Phishing Works' and creator of Dynamic Security Skins (a plugin for Mozilla). She presented some very interesting results from her research efforts, for example 'simply showing a user's history information ("you've been to this website many times" or "you've never submitted this form before") can significantly increase a user's ability to detect a spoofed website and reduce their vulnerability to phishing attacks.' She also suggested to 'make it easy for users to personalize their interfaces. Look at how popular screensavers, ringtones, and application skins are — users clearly enjoy the ability to personalize their interfaces. We can take advantage of this fact to build spoof resistant interfaces.'"

Comments

it doesnt help when

[future assassin]

legit companies send out emails like this and confuse customers. This is from Capital One I got yesterday. Didn't open it at first cause of the url and domain. > bfi0.com Turns out it legit and Capital one uses Bigfoot as their mail server.

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Re:it doesnt help when

[Tackhead]

> legit companies send out emails like this and confuse customers. This is from Capital One I got yesterday. Didn't open it at first cause of the url and domain. > bfi0.com Turns out it legit and Capital one uses Bigfoot as their mail server.

And this, kids, is why you should never outsource your email.

In some small way, I may have helped. Back in the dark ages, my broker did this -- outsourced some of their customer communications to the m0.net (Digital Impact) mainsleaze spamhaus. I wrote 'em a very sharply worded letter to the effect that if they couldn't run something as simple as a mail server, why should I have any faith that they were any more capable of running the web servers that handled my trading requests.

(And what is it with the meta-rule, which seems to be that any domain ending in 0.com or 0.net, is a mainsleaze spammer. m0.net, bfi0.com, and I'm sure there are more out there...)

The letter also included some of the other spew (honest-to-God spam, as opposed to ostensibly solicited customer communications from an organization with which I had an ongoing business relationship) I'd gotten through m0.net, and explained that as a result, I'd pre-emptively marked all mail originating from that domain as "spam", and that my broker was lucky that I periodically checked my filtered spam to see if any false positives had leaked through.

I wasn't the only customer to flame them, because a year or so later, I noticed that my broker was able to email me again, and that they were doing so from a mail server in a netblock owned by them, and with proper DNS registration.

Now that Capital One is in the process of digesting North Fork Bancorp, perhaps both COF and NFB executives could do with a little similar education. My broker got a polite snail-mail flame because it was 1999 and they had an excuse for not knowing any better. There's no excuse in 2006.

GMail's filters failing?

[DAldredge]

Over the past 3 or so weeks I have noticed that the number of phishing emails coming to my slashdot email account that are not caught by the spam filter have increased about 300%.

Is google getting worse or are they getting better?