Cyber Attacks

Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attackers accomplish their attack objectives by co-opting users' credentials. Traditional cyber defenses leave users vulnerable to APT attacks which employ spearphishing. The success of spearphishing attacks is not a data processing failure, but is the result of defenders failing to apply the principles of Human System Integration to the problem of spearphishing. We discuss an alternative defensive strategy which addresses human performance capabilities and limitations to disrupt spearphishing attacks.

Technical defenses (such as email filtering, malware detection, firewalls, limited user privileges, and system monitoring) leave systems unnecessarily exposed to phishing attacks because the human attack surface remains easily accessible and subject to successful attacks based on principles of psychology which are exploited using military deception. The authors propose deception countermeasures which modify the email interface, thereby making the user less susceptible to email-based deception.