Army Researching Network System That Defends Against Social Engineering

Nerval's Lobster writes "The U.S. Army Research Laboratory has awarded as much as $48 million to researchers trying to build computer-security systems that can identify even the most subtle human-exploit attacks and respond without human intervention. The more difficult part of the research will be to develop models of human behavior that allow security systems decide, accurately and on their own, whether actions by humans are part of an attack (whether the humans involved realize it or not). The Army Research Lab (ARL) announced Oct. 8 a grant of $23.2 million to fund a five-year cooperative effort among a team of researchers at Penn State University, the University of California, Davis, Univ. California, Riverside and Indiana University. The five-year program comes with the option to extend it to 10 years with the addition of another $25 million in funding. As part of the project, researchers will need to systematize the criteria and tools used for security analysis, making sure the code detects malicious intrusions rather than legitimate access, all while preserving enough data about any breach for later forensic analysis, according to Alexander Kott, associate director for science and technology at the U.S. Army Research Laboratory. Identifying whether the behavior of humans is malicious or not is difficult even for other humans, especially when it's not clear whether users who open a door to attackers knew what they were doing or, conversely, whether the "attackers" are perfectly legitimate and it's the security monitoring staff who are overreacting. Twenty-nine percent of attacks tracked in the April 23 2013 Verizon Data Breach Investigations Report could be traced to social-engineering or phishing tactics whose goal is to manipulate humans into giving attackers access to secured systems."

Work around it

[dutchwhizzman]

So when a social engineer knows such a system is in place, (s)he will devise a way to do their engineering without the system interfering or finding out. It isn't as if there is no protection or detection put on IT systems already. The trick of social engineering is to use the human factor to work around the technical countermeasures to get to their goal. Putting heuristic systems in place that will try to detect if a technical action may be part of a hacking attempt hasn't stopped virus developers from making viruses that successfully circumvent that. That's essentially all that this is, an attempt to do heuristic detection of malware or mal-action, just like a virus scanner.

One golden rule of defense against SE

[Anonymous Coward]

The client always contacts the server.

Note, "client" and "server" are not necessarily machines in this case. One side may be human and the other a machine.

Example: I receive an e-mail from my broker informing me of a new service available at (link). I am a client of the broker. The broker's machine has contacted me. This is potential SE. I should not follow the link. In fact, it should be a matter of policy for any business that cares about security to NEVER put links in an e-mail since they are always potential SE.

On those rare occasions when servers have a legitimate need to contact a client, they should do so in the form of, "You need to contact us for $reason, Please log on to your account and ask for $department".

Notice that the message not only has no links, but no phone numbers, since they're possibly SE also. A SE attacker can't do any harm with such a message, since its only result is for the client to contact the server and perhaps look a bit foolish asking about something the server doesn't know about. There's no real incentive for a SE attacker to do this, except perhaps to DoS clients and servers; but the attack has limited utility once clients realize they're being DoS'd.

This works for calls from the government, busineses, etc. too. All should be regarded as potential SE. When receiving a call from the "government", you should always be busy and ask for a contact/extension. If they give you a direct number, dial into the trunk anyway. It's the only way to be sure.... other than... well, you know.

The only time this really gets hard is when you have uniformed personnel at your door. It's a tough call on whether or not you should try to hold out for confirmation from dialing the police. I had this happen to me one time. I reasoned (correctly) that a DC cop car with two fully uniformed female officers was extremely unlikely to be a hoax.

Army wants magic computer system

[Mr. Freeman]

The summary can be further summarized as "Army wants computer to know when humans are being dishonest." This is going to go one of two ways:
1. It's going to lock everyone out all the time for false positives.
2. It's not going to detect suspicious behavior.

It will probably start out as one and then progress to 2 as they relax standards or the system "learns" to ignore certain behaviors. Either way, the system isn't going to work. It will, however, cost an absurd amount of money. That much is certain.

Re:Work around it

[Another, completely]

Just because a response is possible doesn't mean defense is pointless. The idea is just to make it difficult and risky enough that the payoff isn't worth it.

If a virus is discovered 99% of the time, then 1% can still cause a lot of damage, and erasing a virus doesn't worry the other virus installations. Detecting and investigating 99% of attempted attacks by people might worry other human attackers.

It's also easy to test whether a commercial virus scanner will detect a new prototype virus. I expect this system would be stored and used in a way to make it difficult for attackers to acquire a copy for the development and testing of social attacks.

if is_bachelor_party() {

[raymorris]

Depends on if it happens during a bachelor party.