Biblio

In this work, we perform security analysis of using an e-mail as a self-service password reset point, and exploit some of the vulnerabilities of e-mail servers' forgotten password reset paths. We perform and illustrate three different attacks on a personal Email account, using a variety of tools such as: public knowledge attainable through social media or public records to answer security questions and execute a social engineering attack, hardware available to the public to perform a man in the middle attack, and free software to perform a brute-force attack on the login of the email account. Our results expose some of the inherent vulnerabilities in using emails as password reset points. The findings are extremely relevant to the security of mobile devices since users' trend has leaned towards usage of mobile devices over desktops for Internet access.

Military reconnaissance in 1999 has paved the way to establish its own, self-reliant and indigenous navigation system. The strategic necessity has been accomplished in 2013 by launching seven satellites in Geo-orbit and underlying Network control center in Bangalore and a new NavIC control center at Lucknow, later in 2016. ISTRAC is one of the premier and amenable center to track the Indian as well as external network satellite launch vehicle and provide house-keeping and inertial navigation (INC) data to launch control center in real time and to project team in off-line. Over the ISTRAC Launch network, Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) was disabled due to security and bandwidth reasons. The cons of SNMP comprise security risks that are normal trait whenever applied as an open standard. There is "security through obscurity" linked with any slight-used communications standard in SNMP. Detailed messages are being sent between devices, not just miniature pre-set codes. These cons in the SNMP are found in majority applications and more bandwidth seizure is another contention. Due to the above pros and cones in SNMP in form of open source, available network monitoring system (NMS) could not be employed for link monitoring and immediate decision making in ISTRAC network. The situation has made requisitions to evolve an in-house network monitoring system (NMS). It was evolved for real-time network monitoring as well as communication link performance explication. The evolved system has the feature of Internet control message protocol (ICMP) based link monitoring, 24/7 monitoring of all the nodes, GUI based real-time link status, Summary and individual link statistics on the GUI. It also identifies total downtime and generates summary reports. It does identification for out of order or looped packets, Email and SMS alert to Prime and Redundant system which one is down and repeat alert if the link is failed for more than 30 minutes. It has easy file based configuration and no application restart required. Generation of daily and monthly link status, offline link analysis plot of any day, less consumption of system resources are add-on features. It is fully secured in-house development, calculates total data flow over a network and co-relate data vs link percentage.

Email privacy is of crucial importance. Existing email encryption approaches are comprehensive but seldom used due to their complexity and inconvenience. We take a new approach to simplify email encryption and improve its usability by implementing receiver-controlled encryption: newly received messages are transparently downloaded and encrypted to a locally-generated key; the original message is then replaced. To avoid the problem of moving a single private key between devices, we implement per-device key pairs: only public keys need be synchronized via a simple verification step. Compromising an email account or server only provides access to encrypted emails. We implemented this scheme on several platforms, showing it works with PGP and S/MIME, is compatible with widely used mail clients and email services including Gmail, has acceptable overhead, and that users consider it intuitive and easy to use.

While advances in cyber-security defensive mechanisms have substantially prevented malware from penetrating into organizational Information Systems (IS) networks, organizational users have found themselves vulnerable to threats emanating from Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) vectors, mostly in the form of spear phishing. In this respect, the question of how an organizational user can differentiate between a genuine communication and a similar looking fraudulent communication in an email/APT threat vector remains a dilemma. Therefore, identifying and evaluating the APT vector attributes and assigning relative weights to them can assist the user to make a correct decision when confronted with a scenario that may be genuine or a malicious APT vector. In this respect, we propose an APT Decision Matrix model which can be used as a lens to build multiple APT threat vector scenarios to identify threat attributes and their weights, which can lead to systems compromise.

Spam emails have been a chronic issue in computer security. They are very costly economically and extremely dangerous for computers and networks. Despite of the emergence of social networks and other Internet based information exchange venues, dependence on email communication has increased over the years and this dependence has resulted in an urgent need to improve spam filters. Although many spam filters have been created to help prevent these spam emails from entering a user's inbox, there is a lack or research focusing on text modifications. Currently, Naive Bayes is one of the most popular methods of spam classification because of its simplicity and efficiency. Naive Bayes is also very accurate; however, it is unable to correctly classify emails when they contain leetspeak or diacritics. Thus, in this proposes, we implemented a novel algorithm for enhancing the accuracy of the Naive Bayes Spam Filter so that it can detect text modifications and correctly classify the email as spam or ham. Our Python algorithm combines semantic based, keyword based, and machine learning algorithms to increase the accuracy of Naive Bayes compared to Spamassassin by over two hundred percent. Additionally, we have discovered a relationship between the length of the email and the spam score, indicating that Bayesian Poisoning, a controversial topic, is actually a real phenomenon and utilized by spammers.

{Phishing is a social engineering tactic used to trick people into revealing personal information [Zielinska, Tembe, Hong, Ge, Murphy-Hill, & Mayhorn 2014]. As phishing emails continue to infiltrate users' mailboxes, what social engineering techniques are the phishers using to successfully persuade victims into releasing sensitive information? Cialdini's [2007] six principles of persuasion (authority, social proof, liking/similarity, commitment/consistency, scarcity, and reciprocation) have been linked to elements of phishing emails [Akbar 2014; Ferreira, & Lenzini 2015]; however, the findings have been conflicting. Authority and scarcity were found as the most common persuasion principles in 207 emails obtained from a Netherlands database [Akbar 2014], while liking/similarity was the most common principle in 52 personal emails available in Luxemborg and England [Ferreira et al. 2015]. The purpose of this study was to examine the persuasion principles present in emails available in the United States over a period of five years. Two reviewers assessed eight hundred eighty-seven phishing emails from Arizona State University, Brown University, and Cornell University for Cialdini's six principles of persuasion. Each email was evaluated using a questionnaire adapted from the Ferreira et al. [2015] study. There was an average agreement of 87% per item between the two raters. Spearman's Rho correlations were used to compare email characteristics over time. During the five year period under consideration (2010–2015), the persuasion principles of commitment/consistency and scarcity have increased over time, while the principles of reciprocation and social proof have decreased over time. Authority and liking/similarity revealed mixed results with certain characteristics increasing and others decreasing. The commitment/consistency principle could be seen in the increase of emails referring to elements outside the email to look more reliable, such as Google Docs or Adobe Reader (rs(850) = .12

Phishing is a social engineering tactic used to trick people into revealing personal information [Zielinska, Tembe, Hong, Ge, Murphy-Hill, & Mayhorn 2014]. As phishing emails continue to infiltrate users' mailboxes, what social engineering techniques are the phishers using to successfully persuade victims into releasing sensitive information?

Cialdini's [2007] six principles of persuasion (authority, social proof, liking/similarity, commitment/consistency, scarcity, and reciprocation) have been linked to elements of phishing emails [Akbar 2014; Ferreira, & Lenzini 2015]; however, the findings have been conflicting. Authority and scarcity were found as the most common persuasion principles in 207 emails obtained from a Netherlands database [Akbar 2014], while liking/similarity was the most common principle in 52 personal emails available in Luxemborg and England [Ferreira et al. 2015]. The purpose of this study was to examine the persuasion principles present in emails available in the United States over a period of five years.

Two reviewers assessed eight hundred eighty-seven phishing emails from Arizona State University, Brown University, and Cornell University for Cialdini's six principles of persuasion. Each email was evaluated using a questionnaire adapted from the Ferreira et al. [2015] study. There was an average agreement of 87% per item between the two raters.

Spearman's Rho correlations were used to compare email characteristics over time. During the five year period under consideration (2010--2015), the persuasion principles of commitment/consistency and scarcity have increased over time, while the principles of reciprocation and social proof have decreased over time. Authority and liking/similarity revealed mixed results with certain characteristics increasing and others decreasing.

The commitment/consistency principle could be seen in the increase of emails referring to elements outside the email to look more reliable, such as Google Docs or Adobe Reader (rs(850) = .12, p =.001), while the scarcity principle could be seen in urgent elements that could encourage users to act quickly and may have had success in eliciting a response from users (rs(850) = .09, p =.01). Reciprocation elements, such as a requested reply, decreased over time (rs(850) = -.12, p =.001). Additionally, the social proof principle present in emails by referring to actions performed by other users also decreased (rs(850) = -.10, p =.01).

Two persuasion principles exhibited both an increase and decrease in their presence in emails over time: authority and liking/similarity. These principles could increase phishing rate success if used appropriately, but could also raise suspicions in users and decrease compliance if used incorrectly. Specifically, the source of the email, which corresponds to the authority principle, displayed an increase over time in educational institutes (rs(850) = .21, p <.001), but a decrease in financial institutions (rs(850) = -.18, p <.001). Similarly, the liking/similarity principle revealed an increase over time of logos present in emails (rs(850) = .18, p <.001) and decrease in service details, such as payment information (rs(850) = -.16, p <.001).

The results from this study offer a different perspective regarding phishing. Previous research has focused on the user aspect; however, few studies have examined the phisher perspective and the social psychological techniques they are implementing. Additionally, they have yet to look at the success of the social psychology techniques. Results from this study can be used to help to predict future trends and inform training programs, as well as machine learning programs used to identify phishing messages.

Billions of dollars of services and goods are sold through email marketing. Subject lines have a strong influence on open rates of the e-mails, as the consumers often open e-mails based on the subject. Traditionally, the e-mail-subject lines are compiled based on the best assessment of the human editors. We propose a method to help the editors by predicting subject line open rates by learning from past subject lines. The method derives different types of features from subject lines based on keywords, performance of past subject lines and syntax. Furthermore, we evaluate the contribution of individual subject-line keywords to overall open rates based on an iterative method-namely Attribution Scoring - and use this for improved predictions. A random forest based model is trained to combine these features to predict the performance. We use a dataset of more than a hundred thousand different subject lines with many billions of impressions to train and test the method. The proposed method shows significant improvement in prediction accuracy over the baselines for both new as well as already used subject lines.
 

Despite all the current controversies, the success of the email service is still valid. The ease of use of its various features contributed to its widespread adoption. In general, the email system provides for all its users the same set of features controlled by a single monolithic policy. Such solutions are efficient but limited because they grant no place for the concept of usage which denotes a user's intention of communication: private, professional, administrative, official, military. The ability to efficiently send emails from mobile devices creates new interesting opportunities. We argue that the context (location, time, device, operating system, access network...) of the email sender appears as a new dimension we have to take into account to complete the picture. Context is clearly orthogonal to usage because a same usage may require different features depending of the context. It is clear that there is no global policy meeting requirements of all possible usages and contexts. To address this problem, we propose to define a correspondence model which for a given usage and context allows to derive a correspondence type encapsulating the exact set of required features. With this model, it becomes possible to define an advanced email system which may cope with multiple policies instead of a single monolithic one. By allowing a user to select the exact policy coping with her needs, we argue that our approach reduces the risk-taking allowing the email system to slide from a trusted one to a confident one.