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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.
To go a slight step further minutes after posting this, does it seem like more and more programs are doing things for us, perhaps without our knowledge? I take for example Xbox 360 games updater: it tells you there's an update, you update it while looking at a little progress bar, and then its done and you play the game again. I for one really want to know what updates there were, at least the significant ones. It would be nice to know if a certain bug that plagued me before was fixed, or if content was added/changed so I can proceed to take advantage of it.
Are people so content with blind usability of their devices?
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
Certain colors have common associations in society, such as red with warning or green with go. Use these color associations to illustrate your point, but proceed with caution, because these associations can differ depending on the nationality of the audience.
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http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/assistance/HA01
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter
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.
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...
To most users out there, their devices are just blackbox tools. As long as the output is what's expected, they could care less what the updates are doing, or what their device is doing. Note that this is very much what software/hardware companies aim for -- "it just works."
That's how you separate the geeks from the boys (not with a crowbar, as has been joked) -- who wants to know what's going on there (and is willing to spend the time to find out), and who is content just playing their game.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
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.'"
That's how you separate the geeks from the boys (not with a crowbar, as has been joked)
Greeks. You're thinking Greeks and boys.
Ancient Greeks that is, you know Sparta and catamites and all that. Your average modern Greek is a fairly religious fellow who frowns on that sort of thing (at least in public, unless there are no women left in the bar at closing time.)
The More You Know(tm)
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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
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.
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"
Not that theres anything wrong with that...
Where does the school board find them and why do they keep sending them to ME?
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.
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.
Enter a junk password at the 'login' page. If it lets you in, it's a phishing site trying to harvest your information.