If you are like me and can’t stand idiocy, you’ll learn to hate the world after reading the study that Schneier found.
Social phishing is sending emails with forged headers to people, using the names of people that are part of the intended victim’s social network, trying to hang their attempt of stealing your data onto the trust you already have in a person or group of people around you, virtual or IRL.
As for why I’m calling idiocy all around…well…
The results were striking: apparently, if the friends of a typical college student are jumping off a cliff, the student would too. Even though the spoofed link directed browsers to an unfamiliar .com address, having it sent by a familiar name sent the success rate up from 16 percent in controls to over 70 percent in the experimental group.
Now…70% hit rate in social phishing??? WTF?!?! That’s telling me that 70% of people (at least in this study) are trusting fools who’ll click anything that is sent their way, give out their important login info into any site that pops up on their browsers.
Also, the study proves that men are suckers when it comes to what a female tells them, as there was a 15% increase on hits when the sender of the phishing email used a female name on the From: and sent it to a male recipient. Oh, and females are 10% more likely to fall for social phishing than guys…which is to be expected, since women are more social than men, at lest in the world around me.
And the more fun part…the study proposes *no* ways to avoid this problem, and truth is…I can’t see many, beyond doing anti-stupidity tests on people before granting them a Computer User License(tm).
So, what’s your take on this whole deal?
Tags: bruce schneier, Security, social phishing
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This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 14th, 2007 at 3:47 pm and is filed under Security. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
My take is why didn’t you post a link to something obviously malformed, like my.space.com or face-book.com and add the link click counter thingee and see who clicked through to count your readers who are in that 70%. :)
lol! I would be very very disappointed if 70% of my readers (what’s 70% of 2? :) ended up falling for such a thing…I’d probably close the blog and never write again :P
Well duh, weren’t these college students? I remember college. fondly. :-D
Well…by the time college came around, I was a bit more…wise in the way of women, so I like to think I wasn’t *that much* of a sucker lol!
On the other hand, the boobies always win :)