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Phishing for Credit
Posted by
Zonk
on Tue Apr 26, 2005 03:55 PM
from the both-academic-and-financial dept.
from the both-academic-and-financial dept.
An anonymous reader writes "Two graduate students at Indiana University conducted a phishing study to
determine how readily students will give up personal information if
the phishing emails appear to come from close friends. Using only
publicly available
information, they sent out emails to students asking them to click a
link that required username/password information. Needless to say,
the study has generated lots of attention on campus. The student
newspaper has the story
and the researchers have created a blog where the participants can vent."
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Dear Friend (Score:4, Funny)
Can you please click on this link [nzbest.com]?
Yours Truly Friendly,
Close Friend
Re:Dear Friend (Score:2)
Re:No joke (Score:3, Insightful)
He makes this extremely good point some ways into the article. People are so gullilble. They're like Pavlov's dogs who salivate every time they see or hear the word "free", or come across anything that has some kind of "deal" attached to it. After the "I got something for free" rush wears off, the actual cost can be quite substantial.
I've managed to confound some people at a local spec
Just watch (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Just watch (Score:5, Insightful)
Seriously, whatever happens, guys sharp enough to organize a phish study couldn't see it coming?
Parent
Re:Just watch (Score:3, Insightful)
... in their defence, they could say that it should have been obvious - after all, their server wasn't located in the .ru tld.
Lesson # 1: Don't do phishing research in Amerika, because In Amerika, phishing does YOU!
Lesson # 2: If you're going to do the time, at least make it worth your while. Make sure you have a buyer for any info you get.
Lesson # 3: Remember to have a good agent for the TV movie and book d
Re:Just watch (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just watch (Score:2)
Re:Just watch (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Just watch (Score:3, Insightful)
If they wanted to protect themselves from possible legal hassle later, they could have just recorded how many click-throughs they got from the actual email. Then, they could have just had the actual web page at the address have something like "No, No, NO! Don't click on links asking you for your password!".
I don't know why eBay doesn't do this already. They could
Re:Just watch (Score:3, Funny)
I see their point, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
"I was frustrated that I was hearing from a friend that my e-mail account was sending her things," Shakespeare said. "I had no idea where it was coming from. I was irritated because I was concerned that my home system was being abused."
Shakespeare called University Information Technology Services, which said it could have been a virus and to not click on the link.
"I've spent a lot of time keeping my (computer) secured," Shakespeare said. "I feel kind of used that it was the University that was making my friends think I had opened up my system to viruses."
If that's really why they're concerned, well, maybe they'd be interested in knowing that the vast majority of virus/malware type things that send email in this fashion still don't originate from the computer of the person in question anyway...therefore, this whole rationale for worry is BS, since spoofed email can come from *anywhere*, and it's most often NOT your own computer.
And - make no mistake, I really do see their point - but the IT resources belong to the university, and neither the university nor the researchers uses the person's account or any password or other credentials belonging to the person. It was simply a spoofed "from" address; nothing more. And if it's strictly "legal" for any random person to spoof a from address, it's just as legal for the purposes of research, whose findings may provide some level of insight on *protecting* people from malicious phishing.
Now, I personally don't know whether any of this justifies doing the study in the way they did. That's a judgment call. If the university's IT organization proper is doing it, that's one thing, and I could see people being uncomfortable with the motivations. But grad students? I don't see any problem with that at all. In fact, they don't need anyone's permission to do what they did. However, in good faith, they did get the approval of the Human Subjects Committee.
Re:I see their point, but... (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I see their point, but... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:I see their point, but... (Score:3, Informative)
You have places like http://www.spooftel.com/ [spooftel.com] and http://www.covertcall.com/ [covertcall.com] (tons more can be found by googling) that easily allow this (caveat, I haven't actually TRIED any of the above, they may be completely bogus).
-- Gary F.
Re:I see their point, but... (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
Your slashdot session has expired (Score:4, Funny)
Nickname:
Password:
Re:Your slashdot session has expired (Score:4, Funny)
passw.....wait a second!
DAMN YOU!
Parent
Re:Your slashdot session has expired (Score:3, Funny)
Password: Freely
Re:Your slashdot session has expired (Score:3, Funny)
<Cthon98> hey, if you type in your pw, it will show as stars
<Cthon98> ********* see!
<AzureDiamond> hunter2
<AzureDiamond> doesnt look like stars to me
<Cthon98> <AzureDiamond> *******
<Cthon98> thats what I see
<AzureDiamond> oh, really?
<Cthon98> Absolutely
<AzureDiamond> you can go hunter2 my hunter2-ing hunter2
<AzureDiamond> haha, does that look funny to you?
<Cthon98> lol, yes. See, when YOU type hunter2, it shows to
Re:Your slashdot session has expired (Score:3, Funny)
Password: ********
Re:Your slashdot session has expired (Score:3)
Password: None Needed
forged headers (Score:5, Informative)
Spam can come from anyone - its not too hard to forge the "FROM" line on an email. I'd hardly call it abuse of your account when spammers do it all the time.
Re:forged headers (Score:2)
RTFA.... (Score:5, Informative)
... to find that they did this experiment under the oversight of the university's Human Subjects Committee.
If that doesn't sound like some sort of ethical guidelines I don't know what does.
Parent
I would imagine.. (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:I would imagine.. (Score:4, Funny)
So, they magically went back in time to get approval from the ethics committee after getting caught? Shit -- fuck the write-up on the phishing -- describe the time machine!
Parent
Heh (Score:5, Funny)
This would make a nice change from the usual celebrity-in-trouble "apologies", where they go on the Tonight Show, bite their lips and look downcast and assure us "I'm very, deeply, truly sorry..."
Instead we can get, "Jay, I have created a blog where people can vent."
Study extension (Score:5, Funny)
After such a successful research on phishing, our two friends have decided to tackle a new study: test how much load e-commerce sites can handle, and how much money ATMs can usually deliver on any given day.
well (Score:2, Funny)
You would think... (Score:2, Insightful)
a license? (Score:2, Insightful)
Well done... (Score:5, Insightful)
Ethics (Score:4, Insightful)
My two reasons why I think it couldnt have been done any other way.
1. This study focuses on deception and how people react when they are decived.
2. Telling the participants they were a part of a study or asking them to be part of it, would effect the behavior of the participants and therefore changing the study results.
As long as the information was not used in any illegal way. Then I don't find a problem with how this expirement was conducted. Yes it sucks to get phished, but its better to be fished by these guys than the hundreds of other phishers who are out there to turn phising into finacial gain.
In other news (Score:3, Funny)
Oh the brainsss! (Score:3, Funny)
Someone posted that on the blog. I think he/she should feel foolish rather than feel betrayed. Or that should be read as "I am so fucking dumb that i cannot believe i did what i did".
Re:Oh the brainsss! (Score:5, Insightful)
That could easily be said for other experiments that have been challenged on ethical grounds. Sometimes experiments find things about ourselves we'd rather not know.
For example, the Milgram experiement [wikipedia.org], where participants were mildly coerced by an authoritative person to administer strong electrical shocks to a subject (who was really an actor). A high proportion of the participants were willing to administer levels of shock that they believed to be lethal.
Would you like to know that you would be capable of murder as long as someone else was there to take the responsibility/blame? Even if the person in the quoted blog post should feel foolish, that does not make the experiment ethical and non-offensive - quite the opposite.
Parent
study successful (Score:4, Interesting)
Welcome to the internet; trust no one. I hope more people got the message.
reportphishing@antiphishing.org (Score:3, Informative)
reportphishing@antiphishing.org
( from http://www.antiphishing.org/report_phishing.html )
Any college age person who is fooled by an email o (Score:3, Funny)
I'm from Indiana (Score:4, Insightful)
Unethical? Possibly -- in the current "enlightened" academic environment where definition of terms is often left to whom screams loudest I suppose that one or more of these embarrassed campus inhabitants has enough functioning brain cells to come up with a completely irrelevant but intensely self-referrential definition which supports their childish outrage. It's highly delusional but they're obviously still children and I don't suppose we can expect actual coherent thought from them until they grow up.
Invasion of privacy"? Drugs must be a significant problem at IU. It always was known as a party school, and this is just more evidence that the description contains some accuracy. And to think that these students are often described as the "best and brightest" and the next generation of leaders. Kinda provides some background for current events, doesn't it?
Rb
What to offended whiners think about Viruses??? (Score:4, Insightful)
It seems their primary complaint is that, GASP, "evil" email looked like it was coming from people they know. WAKE THE HELL UP PEOPLE!!! All the Slammer and Melissa viruses (and their mutated children) DO THE SAME THING: they scan through the address books of their victims, rewrite the "From" line to be one name in the address book, and then write the "To" line to be you (whose name is also in the address book) -- and then there's a good chance that you'll then know the person's name in the "From" line, which (it is hoped) makes you let your guard down and open the infected attachment.
I'll bet $1028 that 90% of the whiners there have been infected by these viruses in the past, and probably still are. And now they've been fooled a second time the same way. How does that old expression go again?
When I find some sympathy these whiners, I'll let them know...
"How to improve your phishing attack" (Score:3, Interesting)
The only thing that really bothers me is that they've essentially shown phishers how to dramatically [indiana.edu] improve their results :
Er... this is sorta like doing research on how to make a better bomb, buddy. This is not socially responsible computer science research, is it? I'd be more interested in determining out how to create a social networking site ( like whatever this "facebook" thing is ) that _can't_ be exploited in such a manner. That sounds like a more productive and useful exercise, and one less likely to get everyone pissed off at you for showing them to be gullible. 70% is a lot, even if that's just an estimate.
Too easy? (Score:5, Funny)
Dear concerned student:
I am a close friend writing to you about your recent experience with a phishing study in which deception was used. I have met with an attorney on this issue who is interested in pursuing a class action lawsuit on behalf of the victims of this study. To participate, please click the link below and provide the following personal information...
Story from an IU employee (Score:4, Interesting)
Thursday, one of my co-workers at the IU campus helpdesk got the email and dismissed it after telling us it might be a potential source of many irate callers later on in the day.
And so it was. I got a caller to send us the full headers of the message that appeared to be from his girlfriend. What do you know? The headers clearly showed the message was originating from whuffo@iu.edu!
So, with our limited helpdesk lookup tools, I found that whuffo@iu.edu was indeed a valid e-mail account, but it was registered as a departmental account and we could not see who personally created the account.
I wanted to get to the bottom of this so I went ahead and looked at the link in the email that it wants users to click on. What do you know? It redirects to a site called www.whuffo.com before asking for the user's credentials!
While my co-workers were bitching about it, I decided to do some detective work (Not sure why my co-workers, normally very competent at problem solving skills, didn't think of this). I looked up the whois info on whuffo.com and what do you know? The domain is registered to Professor Markus Jakobssen, of the IU Informatics Department!
So who's this Markus guy? I found his IU websites. And one of his research interests is 'phishing.' Hmmm. I take a look at the upper level classes he teaches. What do you know? His powerpoint lecture for I400 for this week is all about HOW TO PULL OFF A PHISHING SCAM. Wow, what's the connection here?
Meanwhile, the helpdesk had made this an escalated incident and turned it over to the IT security office. We get a message back (from Tom Jagatic of the IT policy office) saying they are "mitigating the effects of the issue." I had to go look up mitigating in the dictionary before I realized this wasn't a typical response from ITSO. Normally they'd jump on something like this and put a stop to the emails right away.
Giving ITSO the benefit of the doubt, I decide to use my new clues on who might be doing this. With this information in hand, I shot off an e-mail to Tom J. and ITSO and the whole rest of the day, I get no response at all. We continue taking calls from confused users and ask them all to change their passwords as it's all we can really tell them to do at this point.
I go home and check all fucking weekend, and believe me I was watching all our e-mail accounts like a hawk. No response from Tom Jagatic or the IT security office.
So on Monday I'm back at work and I check my mail to find that the whole scam has been put out in the open. In our email there were copies of several mass-emailed apologies to the users who got the phishy message, the users whose identities were spoofed, and to the support center and helpdesk staff. All these messages contained was an explanation of the "experiment" (which you can read in any news story about it) and their "sincere apologies."
The rest is history. The blog that Tom and Markus setup, where people are commenting, has got lots of angry people angry at themselves for being duped. That's not why I'm angry.
All I want from Tom and ITSO is an actual sincere apology for all the work and extra detective skills I/we put into trying to find the perpetrator, since at the time we weren't in on their little plan. No one seems to understand that in any other circumstance, if this were a real security threat, we'd all be getting pats on the back and compliments for figuring out who was behind it before ITSO did (as that's their job, normally.) But, no, since Tom, Markus, ITPO, and ITSO were all in on it, we just get a 'mitigated' effort at an apology from those guys.
Re:5 bucks says... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How legal is this... my spin on it all (Score:3, Insightful)
What was stolen? Ignorance & naivete (Score:3, Insightful)
Something was stolen from the unwitting student/participants. They lost their ignorance of the sad state of the internet's infrastructure. This "experiment" created a harsh wake-up call that e-mail is not a trustworthy medium.
SMTP was never designed for an open environment with untrustworthy users. It was designed for collegial academic networks with funding from people that run closed military networks.
W
Re:The More Attention This Gets, The Better (Score:5, Informative)
That's precisely what they did. The whole thing was authorized from top to bottom. They even got the okay from campus IT to "abuse" the computer systems for their purposes. Try RTFA sometime.
Parent
Actually they did. (from an IU employee) (Score:3, Interesting)