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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.'"
Readers should note that the "Dynamic Security Skins" link goes to a PDF, not a plugin (as I expected).
The only thing an attacker can't simulate is an interface he can't predict.
This will be the key when designing sites in the future.
I can agree that while something like this could help those who are not knowledgable about such things in the digital world, I wonder if perhaps we should be taking steps back to make sure people actually stay informed of such dangers.
For example, I'm creating the front-end for an application and one of the requests was that we build in such things as making sure "male connectors" on parts don't get matched up with other "male connectors", since logically only "female connectors" should work anyway. Now its no real sweat off my back, but it made me think where is the line between common sense and ignorance?
Looking through the PDF linked, I see that the plugin uses some visual hashes as browser backgrounds in trusted situations, but I wonder if there is an anti-phishing extension that would alter the color of the main background of the browser chrome for possible phishing sites. For example, a light-green would be trusted, but variations through a fire-engine red would indicate a possible phishing attempt.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
So this may help one realized that they are not on the actual Paypal/Citibank/Ebay site, and they can leave before they enter their personal information. But many phishing sites have already done their damage by that time, via a drive-by-download; install all forms of malware and spyware in just a few seconds.
I judt got a nre Kinesis keybiartf so please excusr ant egregiou typos.
Hey, this is a really really good idea. Microsoft, Opera Team, and Mozilla should take note!
Good interview, bringing up sound points on the vulnerability of users to electronic attacks. Social Engineering (aka BSing the operator) has been around forever as a valuable tool in any attacker's arsenal.
The problem with a security-minded addon is, most appropriately, whether or not a user will bother to employ it. I can see multiple websites deploying the server side of DSS, but I can see all but a small niche of users not installing the client side, instead relying on their own (generally wrong) assumption that they don't need it. And how long until Microsoft implements its own (propietary, closed-source) 'solution'? How long until it's on and enabled by default on the majority browser? Even then, are we (the idiot users) going to pay attention to the glaring signposts or allow ourselves to be fooled?
Only time will tell, I think... and yet I still believe that Social Engineering (and Reverse Social Engineering) are going to be with us on the electronic environment forever.
"I've spent my whole life figuring out crazy ways to do things. It'll work." -- Montgomery Scott, "Relics"
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?
While this may sound like a good idea at first, why would it work? The majority of people who would know about such a feature, especially if it's a third party downloadable plugin, and then make use of it, are not generally going to be the type of people to be fooled by phishing attempts and unable to recognize the basic things tested for in this study. On top of that, given most people's understanding of computers and the internet and web, I feel pretty safe saying that if your average person was using such a tool and then loaded a phishing site, their thought would not be "oh, this must be a phishing site" it would be "oh, my skin didn't load for some reason." and then probably continue on.
The problem is not a lack of tools out there. The problem is a lack of understanding. We've got millions of people who don't understand the basics of computers on a public, anonymous, worldwide network who are essentially network/server administrators, as far their home pc is concerned. To make it worse, most people not only don't understand, but don't want to understand.
The thought that an average user will personalize their web interface like they personalize their celll phone doesn't fly with me. If that were true, we would see copies of Tweak UI on a lot more wintel boxes. Everyday people would be replacing the explorer shell with LightStep. I don't see that happening. About the most personalization I have seen is people putting up a picture of their girlfriend or baby up as desktop wallpaper. Geeks use custom tools, but most geeks are savvy enough about phishing to not fall for it.
So the "study" is a little lame, and irrelevant to the main point of the article: promoting his new SecuritySkins plugin. The idea is that it's harder for websites to spoof browser features if everyone's browser looks different.
For the record, this idea isn't new. Bank of America has been letting users select a personalized image on their login page for a while now. If the image on the login page doesn't match yours, it didn't come from your bank and you shouldn't enter your password there.
"In a 32-bit world, you're a 2-bit user. You've got your own newsgroup, alt.total.loser." -Weird Al
Phishers will still be able to fool those who are susceptible to email phishing attacks. In the example where a user chooses his or her personal image as a security feature, all a phisher has to do is send out spam requesting that the user either change his image or upload a new one, with a link to the site that will snag that information. Then it's a simple matter of sending out another email prompting the user to log in, with a link to a page displaying that stolen image.
In the end, it's more important to educate users than it is to circumvent their stupidity with technology - there's always a way around things.
Why we are not aggressively tracking down and prosecuting mass repeat spammers and phishers.
If we are, why are we not hearing about it?
I mean, spam and phishing is the blight of the internet. It is aggravating, costly and time consuming. I do not need a mortgage, cialis, a fake rolex, a "pleasure ring" or bogus stock tips. All this spam and phishing is fraud and through use of zombies of hijacked connections, theft or trespassing.
Should we write our congressmen? Become rich and hire the mob to find these people and break some knees?
??
- Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
That's got to be one fucking short paper. I can personally sum it up in three words: "People Are Stupid." Can I get my research grant now?
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Look, as I've said repeatedly (and I don't need a post doc to know this), users fall for phishing because they are in general not Net savvy. A typical user looks at a browser or a desktop application and treats it like their TV/VCR or pocket calculator -- they expect to turn it on, use it, and aren't aware of anything else that it might be doing or be capable of doing. Doesn't matter if it's Firefox, IE, Opera, or what have you, the average user is not going to understand the workings of a browser. Nor should they have to.
There was an article a few days back (memory gets foggy with age) about IE7 and all the new stuff, to which I replied that it was all well and good, but the fact is, there have been no revolutionary new breakthroughs in browser technology. I'm not talking plug-ins, downloads, schemes, scripting, etc., but looking at the browser as more than simply a viewer of web content. It's long past that -- it's now the doorway to information and allows the user to access all kinds of data about themselves and others that is supposed to be "secure."
Browsers have to be redesigned with the average user in mind and they have to be developed to do much more of the security work for the user than they do now. They have to be turned from data reader into combination access port/firewall/security screen, and they have to run these functions automatically (except when you're a knowledgeable sort and can turn the systems on and off to your liking). A browser should stop a user from being able to access "phishy" sites, reject sites where security certificates are dodgy, and alert the user in the strongest terms that the thing they were about to do was stupid and they're not being allowed.
Phishers will continue to winnow out personal data from people as long as no one marches in and builds the next generation of tools to combat them. Trying to do anything with the current crop of technologies is like putting a band-aid over a severed jugular; to truly put the fire out, it will take a technology the phishers are not prepared for and cannot easily simulate.
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
I think you miss the point. The idea isn't to mod the bank site, but for the individual to mod his/her own interface to the bank site. Bank of America is doing this -- you select a personal image. When you login to their site, the login page displays the image your selected. If you don't see the correct image, you know its a phishing attempt. This is still a user education issue, but at least it helps.
How about using the same technique SSH uses: If you come on a site that has the same IP but with a different key or the same key with a different IP: BIG WARNING THAT THIS SITE OR THE COMMUNICATIONS IS POSSIBLY COMPROMISED and provide a link to customer support in case that happens. SSL Certificates just check whether your communications is securely established and I won't examine that certificate everytime I connect. When you want to do Internet banking or something similar, your bank should give you a key on a read-only USB disk or something and the possibility to boot a Damn Small Linux from that disk. My bank did that for a while, but I guess they fell back on just providing the key probably because of the support issues with DSL and xDSL, USB Modems, Winmodems and other crap like getting the VPN through the users' firewall and you had a browser but couldn't go anywhere but the bank's sites. But I have another bank account that just requires a username and password and you're not even on the secure part by then. How dumb is that? I avoid using my Internet banking just for that. The people at the branch sometimes ask why I don't do those simple things (like transferring money) through their site. I am running only Mac and Linux but still I don't want anyone connecting because they keylogged my password - some users might have troubles putting a good password in the first place (insert oblig. spaceballs password quote here). My webmail is more secure than their site (RSA SecurID key required for that), so they could at least do SOME effort like giving me something similar to SecurID for their site.
Custom electronics and digital signage for your business: www.evcircuits.com
I swear that some marketing departments get their e-mail designs from looking at spam. I've have seen some legit corporate e-mails that look so close to previous phishing spam that you would think that they did it on purpose.
The only explanation that I can think of is that they see the phishing spam e-mail, think that it's from their own company, and then design new e-mails to look the same.
Doubt it? We're talking about the marketing department....
Admittedly off-topic, but you might want to look into ditching any CapitalOne credit cards you have. They've been using a somewhat questionable reporting practice recently of only telling how much you have on your card to the reporting agencies, rather then the amount you have and your maximum. The credit agencies, with only the one number, assumes it to be both your current limit and the amount you're using - in other words, that you're using 100% of your credit. This can really screw your credit score.
:)
(If you're curious as to the source of this info, check out Clark Howard's website - if you haven't heard of him, he has a talk radio show and a few books about personal finances)
Just an FYI
End users cannot distinguish well between legitimate sites and phishing sites. Adding in sugar such as the date of the user's last login is helpful only as a positive reminder that the user is on the right site. It's better than nothing, but not by a factor of 10.
Phishing cannot be prevented completely -- it's a social engineering phenomenon and as such will adapt to any technological intervention that tries to stop it. The best possible "solution" to phishing combines a) hardware authentication, b) increasingly "locked down" web browsers, c) web site "reputation", and d) better anti-phishing protection in email services and software.
Companies like Cloudmark leverage a vast and very active user community to almost instantly detect and mitigate new phishing campgaigns. IronKey, founded by the president of the Anti-Phishing Working Group, is developing hardware tokens for authentication. IE7 and Firefox continue to improve their defenses against XSS attacks and the like. And there are good efforts underway to develop URL reputation systems that can help users avoid browsing sites that are dangerous.
Unless this is a highly targetted and customised phishing attack. Collaborative filtering like cloudmark works amazingly well. You can stop a phishing attack spread within a few minutes. Here is more info on collaborative filtering or google for it.
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
We're sorry, due to an upgrade, you've lost the personalizations to this site. We apologize for the inconvenience, please log in and update your settings.
Say the website in question allows you to pick from several different stylesheets, and this selection gets stored as a cookie on the user's machine. Whenever the user goes back to that page, it shows up in the style they've chosen. Then there's no way for the phisher to simulate that, because cookies can't be shared between domains. The user would go to the phishing site and hopefully realize something's wrong when everything looks different.
What I want to know is why none of these dumbass banks use S/MIME to sign the e-mail they send out.
Mozilla Thunderbird does S/MIME. Mac OS X Mail does S/MIME. Lotus Notes does S/MIME. Even Microsoft Exchange does S/MIME.
Sure, it wouldn't solve the problem, but it would at least give clueful users a dead easy way to see if the e-mail was really likely to be from their bank.
While we're on the subject, when is Gmail going to support S/MIME?
GCHQ Quantum Insert installed. If only our tongues were made of glass, how much more careful we would be when we speak
Maybe somebody could explain to me why this wouldn't work. It's trivially simple to implement.
When you create an account on a web site (your bank, ebay, paypal, your broker, whatever), you provide them with a username, password, and a whole bunch of information... why not have a field for "reverse-authentication string"?
Then every email they send to you, they include that string in the subject line.
e.g., if my reverse-auth string was "turkey", the email subject would say "Important message for user Jester99 from CapitalOne -- auth: turkey"
Then I know it's not a phish, because for phishers to have that word, they'd already have CapitalOne's database and I'd already be screwed. (And the odds of them accurately guessing your string are rather small, if you pick anything reasonably ambiguous and not "password") All you have to do is simply not click links that don't have the proper auth word in the subject.
Lots of people here seem to assume that somehow the skins are for the web site, or overriding CSS elements, or whatever, which is just not the case. What she was talking about with those skins is: fake UI. Nothing more, nothing less.
.gif images in the page itself. The page is, say, a frame set with three horizontal frames: one at the top, with a faked toolbar and URL bar (with the correct URL of the bank in that .gif, and correctly colour coded as if it were Mozilla saying it's HTTPS), the login page in the middle, and a faked status bar at the bottom (complete with the padlock icon telling you it's secure.)
E.g., let's say that you got your old mom to use Mozilla, so she has _both_ the coloured URL box _and_ the padlock on the status bar as indication that she's indeed at a secure site. I'll assume you've also educated her to carefully read the URL up there.
So noone can fool her now, right? I mean, right? Well, wrong. One attack method they used in that study was fake UI.
So let's say your mom now lands at some www.phishers-r-us.ru site pretending to be her bank. The site doesn't even use SSL or anything. How can that site spoof all those checks both up there in the browser's toolbar and down there on the status bar? Simple. Fake them.
So the site gives you a javascripted popup, requesting a window without those interface elements. But fakes them as
_That_ is the problem. Fake UI fools most users.
So the researcher's idea is basically, "I know, so let's encourage each user to skin their own UI." So let's say your mom has set her Mozilla UI to be brushed blue-hued metal, the colour for HTTPS URLs to be green, and the padlock icon to be replaced by a thumbs up icon. The fake UI site can't know that. So when they show her a page with the UI in the default colours and icons instead of hers, hopefully your mom will know that it's faked UI. It doesn't look like her other browser windows.
Now personally I think the idea isn't that great anyway, since (A) it requires users to actually do that, and I'll bet most will just click on the default theme and be done with it, and (B) because it's working around what I consider a fucking stupid mis-feature. IMHO there's no need to allow browser windows without an URL bar and without a status bar in the first place. In an age where those are the main (and often only) things that can warn you against such attacks, allowing a site to disable them is just stupid. So just disable the option to hide the UI and, voila, suddenly noone can fake that UI any more. It's that simple.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
if bogus userids and passwords were entered into the bogus phishing portal, then the cost of doing business for the phishers would get very high.
;)
I like it. Maybe another little button like "mark as spam", but in this case it's "mark as phish". When you click "mark as phish" your e-mail plugin does the following:
1) Grabs the source for that page that is linked in the Phishing e-mail
2) Skims the HTML for input fields, generating junk data based on some simple algorithm
3) Submits/Posts the junk data to the address given in the HTML form.
Maybe while we're at it someone can create an "Eliza" like program that would be triggered with a "mark as 419 scam" that would maintain a threaded e-mail discussion with the scammer for weeks. This would keep them busy and prevent them from preying on all the low hanging fruit on the internet. Eat your heart out Turing!
Urge to post... fading... fading... RISING!... fading... fading... gone.
Do they let you upload your own picture, or do you select from a list of what they provide?
Unfortunately, it's the latter. Though they do have several hundred images to choose from.
Plus there's another layer before phishers can retrieve your image based on your login name. If the site doesn't recognize your browser (via a cookie or set of cookies) it will ask a challenge/response question first, *then* it'll show you your chosen image and manually-entered caption. By default it will forget the browser, so if you trust a friend's computer or *shudder* an internet cafe with access to your banking site, you can use it once without it setting that cookie, or you can click a checkbox to have it recognize your browser next time and start with the image+phrase.
Once all that's done, *then* it asks for your password.
Enter a junk password at the 'login' page. If it lets you in, it's a phishing site trying to harvest your information.
FTA: Participants proved vulnerable across the board to phishing attacks. In our study, neither education, age, sex, previous experience, nor hours of computer use showed a statistically significant correlation with vulnerability to phishing.
No check for "familiarity with elementary principles of cryptography" giving a correlation. I suspect that anyone who recognize the significance of the names "Alice, Bob, and Eve" will probably be far less vulnerable than average.
I'll also note that while they claim: "There is no significant correlation between the score and the primary or secondary type of browser or operating systems used by participants", their breakdown of participants indicated no Linux users were studied. Of course, Linux users are a weirdo minority, but I would be curious.
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
We're sorry, but we've lost your site customization settings. You can go to Preferences to re-set them. In other words, yeah right.
When you create an account on a web site (your bank, ebay, paypal, your broker, whatever), you provide them with a username, password, and a whole bunch of information... why not have a field for "reverse-authentication string"?
Then every email they send to you, they include that string in the subject line.
You can actualy go one better today, without telling your bank what you are doing.
Give your bank a unique email address. Never use that email address for anything else.
The odds of getting a phish on that email address are close to nil unless you or the bank gets hacked.
This is how I filter virtually all phishes to date. If it arrives on an address not known to the entity being represented, it's obviously a fake.
Or would they? A notice on the top of the site saying that "to improve security, we've currently suspended personalised styles so everyone gets the default one" or "we're currently upgrading the personalised styles (to give you the next generation of smilies
Besides, there's the old adage that the average user will click whatever he or she thinks will let him get his task done quickest. They might think "hmm, the colours have changed" but that'll be quickly followed by "ahh, but there's the box I need to enter my details to log in".
Undoubtedly it'll help a little, but I reckon in the majority of cases colour change =/=> don't use this site.
My, that was a yummy potato!