Identifying contextual clues
PROBING WHY PHISHING REMAINS SUCCESSFUL
A new paper published by three academics tries to explain why, after all the press about phishing scams, so many computer users continue to fall for them. "Why Phishing Works," written by Rachna Dhamija of Harvard University and Marti Hearst and J. D. Tygar of the University of California at Berkeley [for CHI 2006], points out that despite a general awareness of phishing rackets, most users are unable to discern the difference between a legitimate Web site and one spoofed to look like the site of a bank or other financial institution. In one exercise, the researchers created a fake bank site that fooled 91 percent of subjects participating in the experiment. Similarly, 77 percent misidentified a legitimate E*Trade e-mail as fraudulent. Experts attribute some of the problem to ignorance and some to users' not taking simple precautions, such as looking closely at the address bar of Web pages. Bernhard Otupal, a crime intelligence officer for high-tech crime at Interpol, noted that in one recent phishing scam, a number of users went to a site pretending to be that of a prominent bank and entered personal information even though they were not even customers of that bank.
ZDNet, 3 April 2006
from Edupage, April 05, 2006
"Edupage is a service of EDUCAUSE, a nonprofit association whose mission is to advance higher education by promoting the intelligent use of information technology."
posted by JohnM @ 11:23
6 Comments:
I read this paper the other day and found it fascinating. I'm always sending out emails about phishing and other scams to watch out for to my co-workers and they always marvel about how anyone can fall for that stuff. It is so hard not to laugh at that and say something like, "um, yeah remember when you called me about the email that said your ebay password was going to expire and you were worried because you didn't think you had an ebay password?"
When I found the paper I sent an email with the link to them all, encouraging them to read it. I know, I am deluded. But I keep trying and hoping that maybe a little of it sticks every now and then.
I am one of those high nerd factor power users who knows all the keyboard shortcuts for things, pay all my bills online, Google expert, have used email for 15 years, build my own computers, etc., so I'm always astonished how little the average person (and especially the advanced-degree-holding academic) knows about computers in general.
My post title, "Identifying contextual clues", hints at something else, though, that's not tech-related: awareness of contextual facets, or just awareness of self and the world around you. The person who doesn't notice the contextual clues in spam and phishing scams is probably the same person who walks around with his shoe untied, or the glob of catsup on his face, or the trail of things falling out of her pocketbook. I don't understand those people. And I don't know how to help them.
I guess (after reading the paper) that I'm referring to the 'Bounded Attention' facet the authors describe. This passage made me hyperventilate a little:
"One participant actually submitted her username and password to some websites in order to verify if it was a site at which she had an account. She stated that this is a strategy that she has used reliably in practice to determine site authenticity. Her reasoning was "What’s the harm? Passwords are not dangerous to give out, like financial information is". This participant admitted she does use the same password for many sites, but never considered that passwords obtained at one website might be used for fraudulent purposes at another site." [6]
Yes, that is a rather chilling passage isn't it?
I'm going to disagree with with on the kinds of people who miss the contextual clues though. The people I work with are all social services types--therapists, social workers, etc--and while some of them are the kind who are lucky their heads are attached, they are not the only ones who don't get "it."
I think it depends a lot on how a person views a computer. Is it an enemy? (many therapists I work with feel this way) Is it a tool? Is it a toy? Is it a machine? And also on how much trust they have. The woman in the password example has probably fallen for nearly every sales pitch she's ever heard :) It feels so wrong to suggest people should be less trusting, but that's exactly what I'm trying to get my coworkers to do.
We should also note that most interfaces have historically been pretty user hostile, and it's not fair to blame people for not knowing things that they shouldn't have to know anyway (e.g., IP address/DNS notation, http/https).
The less-trusting thing is sad. I understand the economics of spam. I don't understand the psychology of virus writers, Wikipedia hackers (or vandals of any kind, for that matter). Combine that with sloppy coding that creates inadvertent security holes, and it's hard to trust anything online.
Except lit blogs, of course. Lit bloggers are good people. :)
So true about the UIs. Add to that the fact the most people have no idea how computers work and well--bad news.
I don't get the virus writer mentality either.
Lit bloggers are very good people :)
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