Biblio
Cloud computing is a remarkable model for permitting on-demand network access to an elastic collection of configurable adaptive resources and features including storage, software, infrastructure, and platform. However, there are major concerns about security-related issues. A very critical security function is user authentication using passwords. Although many flaws have been discovered in password-based authentication, it remains the most convenient approach that people continue to utilize. Several schemes have been proposed to strengthen its effectiveness such as salted hashes, one-time password (OTP), single-sign-on (SSO) and multi-factor authentication (MFA). This study proposes a new authentication mechanism by combining user's password and modified characters of CAPTCHA to generate a passkey. The modification of the CAPTCHA depends on a secret agreed upon between the cloud provider and the user to employ different characters for some characters in the CAPTCHA. This scheme prevents various attacks including short-password attack, dictionary attack, keylogger, phishing, and social engineering. Moreover, it can resolve the issue of password guessing and the use of a single password for different cloud providers.
Phishing is one of the major issues in cyber security. In phishing, attackers steal sensitive information from users by impersonation of legitimate websites. This information captured by phisher is used for variety of scenarios such as buying goods using online transaction illegally or sometime may sell the collected user data to illegal sources. Till date, various detection techniques are proposed by different researchers but still phishing detection remains a challenging problem. While phishing remains to be a threat for all users, persons with visual impairments fall under the soft target category, as they primarily depend on the non-visual web access mode. The persons with visual impairments solely depends on the audio generated by the screen readers to identify and comprehend a web page. This weak-link shall be harnessed by attackers in creating impersonate sites that produces same audio output but are visually different. This paper proposes a model titled "MASPHID" (Model for Assisting Screenreader users to Phishing Detection) to assist persons with visual impairments in detecting phishing sites which are aurally similar but visually dissimilar. The proposed technique is designed in such a manner that phishing detection shall be carried out without burdening the users with technical details. This model works against zeroday phishing attack and evaluate high accuracy.
We are confronted with the threat from the theft of user-id / password information caused by phishing attacks. Now authentication by using the user-id and password is no longer safe. We can use the PKI-based authentication as a safer authentication mechanism. In our university, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), we deployed On Demand Digital Certificate Issuing System for our users, and employ the PKI-based client certificates for log-on to web application, connecting to wireless network (including eduroam), using VPN service, and email sender signing. In addition, National In-stitute of Information (NII), which are providing common ICT infrastructure services for Japanese universities and institutes, started a service to issue client certificates in this year. So use of the electronic certificates will become more popular within a few years in Japan. However, there are not so enough cases deploying the electronic certificate based authentication in University infrastructure, we still has many tips and issues on operating this. In this paper, we introduce the use case of the electronic certificate in JAIST, the challenges and issues, and consider the future prospects.
End users are prone to insecure cyber behavior that may lead them to compromise the integrity, availability or confidentiality of their computer systems. For instance, replying to a phishing email may compromise an end user's login credentials. Identifying tendency toward insecure cyber behavior is critically important to improve cyber security posture and thesis of this paper is that the susceptibility of end-users to be a victim of a cyber-attack may be predicted using personality traits such as trait anxiety and callousness. This paper presents an easily configurable, script-based software tool to explore the relationships between the personality traits and insecure cyber behaviors of end users. The software utilizes well-established cognitive methods (such as dot probe) to identify a number of personality traits for a user and further allows researchers to design and conduct experiments through customizable scripting to study the endusers' insecure cyber behaviors. The software also collects fine-grained data on users for analysis.
The Security Behavior Intentions Scale (SeBIS) measures the computer security attitudes of end-users. Because intentions are a prerequisite for planned behavior, the scale could therefore be useful for predicting users' computer security behaviors. We performed three experiments to identify correlations between each of SeBIS's four sub-scales and relevant computer security behaviors. We found that testing high on the awareness sub-scale correlated with correctly identifying a phishing website; testing high on the passwords sub-scale correlated with creating passwords that could not be quickly cracked; testing high on the updating sub-scale correlated with applying software updates; and testing high on the securement sub-scale correlated with smartphone lock screen usage (e.g., PINs). Our results indicate that SeBIS predicts certain computer security behaviors and that it is a reliable and valid tool that should be used in future research.
The orthodox paradigm to defend against automated social-engineering attacks in large-scale socio-technical systems is reactive and victim-agnostic. Defenses generally focus on identifying the attacks/attackers (e.g., phishing emails, social-bot infiltrations, malware offered for download). To change the status quo, we propose to identify, even if imperfectly, the vulnerable user population, that is, the users that are likely to fall victim to such attacks. Once identified, information about the vulnerable population can be used in two ways. First, the vulnerable population can be influenced by the defender through several means including: education, specialized user experience, extra protection layers and watchdogs. In the same vein, information about the vulnerable population can ultimately be used to fine-tune and reprioritize defense mechanisms to offer differentiated protection, possibly at the cost of additional friction generated by the defense mechanism. Secondly, information about the user population can be used to identify an attack (or compromised users) based on differences between the general and the vulnerable population. This paper considers the implications of the proposed paradigm on existing defenses in three areas (phishing of user credentials, malware distribution and socialbot infiltration) and discusses how using knowledge of the vulnerable population can enable more robust defenses.
Smartphones have fueled a shift in the way we communicate with each other via Instant Messaging. With the convergence of Internet and telephony, new Over-The-Top (OTT) messaging applications (e.g., WhatsApp, Viber, WeChat etc.) have emerged as an important means of communication for millions of users. These applications use phone numbers as the only means of authentication and are becoming an attractive medium for attackers to deliver spam and carry out more targeted attacks. The universal reach of telephony along with its past trusted nature makes phone numbers attractive identifiers for reaching potential attack targets. In this paper, we explore the feasibility, automation, and scalability of a variety of targeted attacks that can be carried out by abusing phone numbers. These attacks can be carried out on different channels viz. OTT messaging applications, voice, e-mail, or SMS. We demonstrate a novel system that takes a phone number as an input, leverages information from applications like Truecaller and Facebook about the victim and his / her social network, checks the presence of phone number's owner (victim) on the attack channel (OTT messaging applications, voice, e-mail, or SMS), and finally targets the victim on the chosen attack channel. As a proof of concept, we enumerated through a random pool of 1.16 million phone numbers and demonstrated that targeted attacks could be crafted against the owners of 255,873 phone numbers by exploiting cross-application features. Due to the significantly increased user engagement via new mediums of communication like OTT messaging applications and ease with which phone numbers allow collection of pertinent information, there is a clear need for better protection of applications that rely on phone numbers.
Association and classification are two important tasks in data mining. Literature abounds with works that unify these two techniques. This paper presents a new algorithm called Particle Swarm Optimization trained Classification Association Rule Mining (PSOCARM) for associative classification that generates class association rules (CARs) from transactional database by formulating a combinatorial global optimization problem, without having to specify minimal support and confidence unlike other conventional associative classifiers. We devised a new rule pruning scheme in order to reduce the number of rules and increasing the generalization aspect of the classifier. We demonstrated its effectiveness for phishing email and phishing website detection. Our experimental results indicate the superiority of our proposed algorithm with respect to accuracy and the number of rules generated as compared to the state-of-the-art algorithms.
Most anti-phishing solutions that exist today require scanning a large portion of the web, which is vast and equivalent to finding a needle in a haystack. In addition, such solutions are not very efficient. We propose a different approach. Our solution does not rely on the scanning of the entire Internet or a large portion of it and only needs access to the brand's traffic in order to be able to detect phishing attempts against that brand. By analyzing a sample of phishing websites, we find features that can be used to distinguish phishing websites from the legitimate ones. We then use these features to train a machine learning classifier capable of helping brands detect phishing attempts against them. Our approach can detect up to 86% of phishing attacks against the brands and is best used as a complementary tool to the existing anti-phishing solutions.
{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 one of the most dangerous information security threats present in the world today, with losses toping 5.9 billion dollars in 2013. Evolving from the original concept of phishing, spear phishing also attempts to scam individuals online, however it uses personalized mail to yield a far higher success rate. This paper suggests an increased threat of spear phishing success due to the presence of social media. Assessing this new threat is important not only to the individuals, but also to companies whose employees may specifically be targeted through their social media accounts. The paper presents the design and implementation of an architecture to determine phishing susceptibility of a user through their social media accounts, and methods to reduce the threat. Preliminary testing shows that social media provides a publicly accessible resource to assess targeted individuals for phishing attacks through their accounts.
Objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of domain highlighting in helping users identify whether webpages are legitimate or spurious.
Background: As a component of the URL, a domain name can be overlooked. Consequently, browsers highlight the domain name to help users identify which website they are visiting. Nevertheless, few studies have assessed the effectiveness of domain highlighting, and the only formal study confounded highlighting with instructions to look at the address bar.
Method: Two phishing detection experiments were conducted. Experiment 1 was run online: Participants judged the legitimacy of webpages in two phases. In phase one, participants were to judge the legitimacy based on any information on the webpage, whereas phase two they were to focus on the address bar. Whether the domain was highlighted was also varied. Experiment 2 was conducted similarly but with participants in a laboratory setting, which allowed tracking of fixations.
Results: Participants differentiated the legitimate and fraudulent webpages better than chance. There was some benefit of attending to the address bar, but domain highlighting did not provide effective protection against phishing attacks. Analysis of eye-gaze fixation measures was in agreement with the task performance, but heat-map results revealed that participants’ visual attention was attracted by the domain highlighting.
Conclusion: Failure to detect many fraudulent webpages even when the domain was highlighted implies that users lacked knowledge of webpage security cues or how to use those cues.
Application: Potential applications include development of phishing-prevention training incorporating domain highlighting with other methods to help users identify phishing webpages.
To evaluate the effectiveness of domain highlighting in helping users identify whether Web pages are legitimate or spurious. As a component of the URL, a domain name can be overlooked. Consequently, browsers highlight the domain name to help users identify which Web site they are visiting. Nevertheless, few studies have assessed the effectiveness of domain highlighting, and the only formal study confounded highlighting with instructions to look at the address bar. We conducted two phishing detection experiments. Experiment 1 was run online: Participants judged the legitimacy of Web pages in two phases. In Phase 1, participants were to judge the legitimacy based on any information on the Web page, whereas in Phase 2, they were to focus on the address bar. Whether the domain was highlighted was also varied. Experiment 2 was conducted similarly but with participants in a laboratory setting, which allowed tracking of fixations. Participants differentiated the legitimate and fraudulent Web pages better than chance. There was some benefit of attending to the address bar, but domain highlighting did not provide effective protection against phishing attacks. Analysis of eye-gaze fixation measures was in agreement with the task performance, but heat-map results revealed that participants’ visual attention was attracted by the highlighted domains. Failure to detect many fraudulent Web pages even when the domain was highlighted implies that users lacked knowledge of Web page security cues or how to use those cues. Potential applications include development of phishing prevention training incorporating domain highlighting with other methods to help users identify phishing Web pages.
There is growing evidence that spear phishing campaigns are increasingly pervasive, sophisticated, and remain the starting points of more advanced attacks. Current campaign identification and attribution process heavily relies on manual efforts and is inefficient in gathering intelligence in a timely manner. It is ideal that we can automatically attribute spear phishing emails to known campaigns and achieve early detection of new campaigns using limited labelled emails as the seeds. In this paper, we introduce four categories of email profiling features that capture various characteristics of spear phishing emails. Building on these features, we implement and evaluate an affinity graph based semi-supervised learning model for campaign attribution and detection. We demonstrate that our system, using only 25 labelled emails, achieves 0.9 F1 score with a 0.01 false positive rate in known campaign attribution, and is able to detect previously unknown spear phishing campaigns, achieving 100% 'darkmoon', over 97% of 'samkams' and 91% of 'bisrala' campaign detection using 246 labelled emails in our experiments.
Phishing is an online security attack in which the hacker aims in harvesting sensitive information like passwords, credit card information etc. from the users by making them to believe what they see is what it is. This threat has been into existence for a decade and there has been continuous developments in counter attacking this threat. However, statistical study reveals how phishing is still a big threat to today's world as the online era booms. In this paper, we look into the art of phishing and have made a practical analysis on how the state of the art anti-phishing systems fail to prevent Phishing. With the loop-holes identified in the state-of-the-art systems, we move ahead paving the roadmap for the kind of system that will counter attack this online security threat more effectively.
Information and Communications Technologies (ICTs), especially the Internet, have become a key enabler for government organisations, businesses and individuals. With increasing growth in the adoption and use of ICT devices such as smart phones, personal computers and the Internet, Cybersecurity is one of the key concerns facing modern organisations in both developed and developing countries. This paper presents an overview of cybersecurity challenges in Bhutan, within the context that the nation is emerging as an ICT developing country. This study examines the cybersecurity incidents reported both in national media and government reports, identification and analysis of different types of cyber threats, understanding of the characteristics and motives behind cyber-attacks, and their frequency of occurrence since 1999. A discussion on an ongoing research study to investigate cybersecurity management and practices for Bhutan's government organisations is also highlighted.
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.
Spear-phishing attacks pose a serious threat to sensitive computer systems, since they sidestep technical security mechanisms by exploiting the carelessness of authorized users. A common way to mitigate such attacks is to use e-mail filters which block e-mails with a maliciousness score above a chosen threshold. Optimal choice of such a threshold involves a tradeoff between the risk from delivered malicious emails and the cost of blocking benign traffic. A further complicating factor is the strategic nature of an attacker, who may selectively target users offering the best value in terms of likelihood of success and resulting access privileges. Previous work on strategic threshold-selection considered a single organization choosing thresholds for all users. In reality, many organizations are potential targets of such attacks, and their incentives need not be well aligned. We therefore consider the problem of strategic threshold-selection by a collection of independent self-interested users. We characterize both Stackelberg multi-defender equilibria, corresponding to short-term strategic dynamics, as well as Nash equilibria of the simultaneous game between all users and the attacker, modeling long-term dynamics, and exhibit a polynomial-time algorithm for computing short-term (Stackelberg) equilibria. We find that while Stackelberg multi-defender equilibrium need not exist, Nash equilibrium always exists, and remarkably, both equilibria are unique and socially optimal.
We proposed a multi-granularity approach to present risk information of mobile apps to the end users. Within this approach the highest level is a summary risk index, which allows quick and easy comparison among multiple apps that provide similar functionality. We have developed several types of risk index, such as text saying “High Risk” or number of filled circles (Gates, Chen, Li, & Proctor, 2014). Through both online and in-lab studies, we found that when presented the interface with the summary risk index, participants made more secure app-selection decisions. Subsequent research showed that framing of the summary risk information affects users’ app-selection decisions, and positive framing in terms of safety has an advantage over negative framing in terms of risk (Chen, Gates, Li, & Proctor, 2014).
In addition to the summary risk index, some users may also want more detailed risk information for the apps. We have been developing an intermediate-level risk display that presents only the major risk categories. As a first step, we conducted user studies to have expert users’ identify the major risk categories (personal privacy, monetary loss, and device stability) and validate the categories on typical users (Jorgensen, Chen, Gates, Li, Proctor, & Yu, 2015). In a subsequent study, we are developing a graphical display to incorporate these risk categories into the current app interface and test its effectiveness.
This multi-granularity approach can be applied to risk communication in other contexts. For example, in the context of communicating the potential risk associated with phishing attacks, an effective warning should be designed to include both higher-level and lower-level risk information: A higher-level index information about how likely an email message or website is a phishing one should be presented to users and inform them about the potential risk in an easy-to-comprehend manner; a more detailed explanation should also be available for users who want to know more about the warning and the index. We have completed a pilot study in this area and are initiating a full study to investigate the effectiveness of such an interface in preventing users from being phished successfully.
The Domain Name System (DNS) is widely seen as a vital protocol of the modern Internet. For example, popular services like load balancers and Content Delivery Networks heavily rely on DNS. Because of its important role, DNS is also a desirable target for malicious activities such as spamming, phishing, and botnets. To protect networks against these attacks, a number of DNS-based security approaches have been proposed. The key insight of our study is to measure the effectiveness of security approaches that rely on DNS in large-scale networks. For this purpose, we answer the following questions, How often is DNS used? Are most of the Internet flows established after contacting DNS? In this study, we collected data from the University of Auckland campus network with more than 33,000 Internet users and processed it to find out how DNS is being used. Moreover, we studied the flows that were established with and without contacting DNS. Our results show that less than 5 percent of the observed flows use DNS. Therefore, we argue that those security approaches that solely depend on DNS are not sufficient to protect large-scale networks.
Social networking sites (SNSs), with their large number of users and large information base, seem to be the perfect breeding ground for exploiting the vulnerabilities of people, who are considered the weakest link in security. Deceiving, persuading, or influencing people to provide information or to perform an action that will benefit the attacker is known as "social engineering." Fraudulent and deceptive people use social engineering traps and tactics through SNSs to trick users into obeying them, accepting threats, and falling victim to various crimes such as phishing, sexual abuse, financial abuse, identity theft, and physical crime. Although organizations, researchers, and practitioners recognize the serious risks of social engineering, there is a severe lack of understanding and control of such threats. This may be partly due to the complexity of human behaviors in approaching, accepting, and failing to recognize social engineering tricks. This research aims to investigate the impact of source characteristics on users' susceptibility to social engineering victimization in SNSs, particularly Facebook. Using grounded theory method, we develop a model that explains what and how source characteristics influence Facebook users to judge the attacker as credible.
Phishing continues to remain a lucrative market for cyber criminals, mostly because of the vulnerable human element. Through emails and spoofed-websites, phishers exploit almost any opportunity using major events, considerable financial awards, fake warnings and the trusted reputation of established organizations, as a basis to gain their victims' trust. For many years, humans have often been referred to as the `weakest link' towards protecting information. To gain their victims' trust, phishers continue to use sophisticated looking emails and spoofed websites to trick them, and rely on their victims' lack of knowledge, lax security behavior and organizations' inadequate security measures towards protecting itself and their clients. As such, phishing security controls and vulnerabilities can arguably be classified into three main elements namely human factors (H), organizational aspects (O) and technological controls (T). All three of these elements have the common feature of human involvement and as such, security gaps are inevitable. Each element also functions as both security control and security vulnerability. A holistic framework towards combatting phishing is required whereby the human feature in all three of these elements is enhanced by means of a security education, training and awareness programme. This paper discusses the educational factors required to form part of a holistic framework, addressing the HOT elements as well as the relationships between these elements towards combatting phishing. The development of this framework uses the principles of design science to ensure that it is developed with rigor. Furthermore, this paper reports on the verification of the framework.
This article discusses how a system of Identification: Friend or Foe (IFF) can be implemented in email to make users less susceptible to phishing attacks.