Perilocity

Teachable Moment: APWG/CMU Phishing Education Landing Page program

Phishing? Fail!

When you take down a phishing domain or server, don't just take it off the net: redirect it to this education page so victims of phishing can learn in the act of being suckered by a phisher that they should be more careful what they click on.

As someone in the audience pointed out, whatever you do don't redirect phishing pages back to the actual sites being phished, i.e., if the phisher was pretending to be a bank, don't take down the phisher's redirect and replace it with a redirect to the bank itself. THat just teaches people the wrong thing, to follow a bad link.

Instead, link to the APWG/CMU landing page. Which could use a catchier name (how about Phishing: Fail!), but it's already a really good service.

MySpace Anti-Phishing

Shing Yin Khor of Fox Interactive Media, which owns MySpace, gave an entertaining talk at APWG in which she gave a good case that MySpace has mostly eliminated phishing ads on MySpace and is busily suppressing other phishing.

Throwing money at the issue of phishing actually works.

MySpace's anti-phishing forces include former law enforcement people, including a former federal and state prosecutor, a former L.A. D.A., and a former FBI agent. They have successfully sued spam king Scott "ringtones" Richter and his CPA empire.

MySpace does have an advantage in actually hosting all displays and messages. It's good to be a many-hundred-million shopping mall. She didn't say that; I did. She did say they use MySpace specific measures such as education via Tom's profile. Tom was one of the founders of MySpace. Every new user gets Tom as a friend, so his online persona (pictured) has 240 million friends, so that's a channel that reaches most of their users. She did say:

Education is just as important as technical measures.

What works on MySpace will work on other social network sites.

But Shing's theme of pro-active measures against phishing and spam is one other organizations could take to heart. Don't think you can do nothing: you can.

Of course, if you have fewer than 200 million users, you may want to band together with other organizations, for example by joining APWG. Even MySpace does.

APWG Atlanta Buckhead

Five years of the Anti-Phishing Working Group! Dave Jevans gave a retrospective, followed by country reports:

Japan: Pretending to be grandchild to get bank account transfer is popular. ATM scams are the most lucrative.

Russia: Second biggest global source of spam. Ecrime economy is ten times the si ze of the anti-ecrime industry, and that's a problem.

Brazil: Most phishing is done locally. Is all organized crime.

I don't want to go into too much detail, even though the bad guys don't seem to need any help. APWG continues to climb the ecrimeware curve, catching up with th e miscreants.

Paypal Says Old IE is Like Car Without Seat Belt: EV SSL blocking

The eBay-owned company, which runs a Web-based payment system that allows the transfer of funds between bank accounts and credit cards, said browsers that do not have support for blocking identity theft-related Web sites or for EV SSL (Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer) certificates are considered "unsafe" for financial transactions.

"In our view, letting users view the PayPal site on one of these browsers is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seat belts," said PayPal Chief Information Security Officer Michael Barrett.

...

Barrett only mentioned old, out-of-support versions of Microsoft's Internet Explorer among this group of "unsafe browsers," but it's clear his warning extends to Apple's Safari browser, which offers no anti-phishing protection and does not support the use of EV SSL certificates.

— BPayPal Plans to Ban Unsafe Browsers, By Ryan Naraine, EWeek.com, 2008-04-17

Now on the one hand, I think EV SSL is color-coded checklist security candy:

Class Action Coming for Identity Theft?

It wouldn't be a moment too soon:

I painfully predicted a few years back that phishing and related identity theft would result in class action suits. I lost my bet as it didn't happen fast enough, but a significant step has been taken (reported by Lynn) with the publication of a book that apparently blames the banks and the software manufacturers for identity theft.

— Signs of Liability: 'Zero Day Threat' blames IT and Security industry, Ian Grigg, Financial Cryptography, April 14, 2008

The book review iang quotes gets it about online crime not being amateur anymore: it's organized. And it gets it about perhaps a more important point:

OK Leaks Tens of Thousands of SSNs for Years

You'd think they'd know better:

One of the cardinal rules of computer programming is to never trust your input. This holds especially true when your input comes from users, and even more so when it comes from the anonymous, general public. Apparently, the developers at Oklahoma’s Department of Corrections slept through that day in computer science class, and even managed to skip all of Common Sense 101. You see, not only did they trust anonymous user input on their public-facing website, but they blindly executed it and displayed whatever came back.

The result of this negligently bad coding has some rather serious consequences: the names, addresses, and social security numbers of tens of thousands of Oklahoma residents were made available to the general public for a period of at least three years.

— Oklahoma Leaks Tens of Thousands of Social Security Numbers, Other Sensitive Data, by Alex Papadimoulis in Feature Articles, The Daily WTF, 2008-04-15

But the best part is what it took to get the state to fix it:

New School: New Book by Adam Shostack

Adam Shostack, whose group blog Emergent Chaos I quote frequently in this blog, has a new book coming out with co-author Andrew Stewart: New School of Information Security.

We think there's an emerging way of approaching the world, which we call the New School.

We start with a look at some persistent issues like spam and identity theft. From there, we look at why the information security industry hasn't just fixed them, and some of the data sources which we rely on and how poor they are. We then look at some new source of data, and new ways of interpreting them, and close with some very practical steps that any individual or organization can take to make things better.

— The New School of Information Security, Adam Shostack, Emergent Chaos, 10 March 2008

I haven't read the book yet, since it's not published yet, but if it's like the material he posts in his blog, it's a good thing.

One of his commenters doesn't get it:

Publicity about Internal Fraud: Still an Issue after 30 Years

Adam quotes a 30 year old book about computer security and notes that the IRS then and now doesn't adequately protect taxpayers' information and promises to do better. His quote that I like best, though is:

Top management people in large corporations fear that publicity about internal fraud could well affect their companies' trading positions on the stock market, hold the corporation up to public ridicule, and cause all sorts of turmoil... (Computer Capers, page 72)

— Computer Capers: Tales of electronic thievery, embezzlement, and fraud, by Thomas Whiteside, Ty Crowell Co., 1978

That's why corporations fear a breach reporting reputation system. That's also why we need one.

-jsq ~

Phishing Verified

Or is it really phishing when the victim first broadcasts his bank account details?

BTop Gear presenter Jeremy Clarkson has admitted he was wrong to brand the scandal of lost CDs containing the personal data of millions of Britons a "storm in a teacup" after falling victim to an internet scam.

The outspoken star printed his bank details in a newspaper to try and make the point that his money would be safe and that the spectre of identity theft was a sham.

He also gave instructions on how to find his address on the electoral roll and details about the car he drives.

However, in a rare moment of humility Clarkson has now revealed the stunt backfired and his details were used to set up a £500 direct debit payable from his account to the British Diabetic Association.

The charity is one of many organisations that do not need a signature to set up a direct debit.

— Clarkson stung by fraud stunt, Guardian Unlimited, Monday January 7 2008

He admits he was wrong, but nonetheless tries to pin the blame partly on a privacy law:

"The bank cannot find out who did this because of the Data Protection Act and they cannot stop it from happening again," he said. "I was wrong and I have been punished for my mistake."

At least he doesn't call for revoking that Act; he does call for going after the perpetrators.

-jsq

PS: Seen on BoingBoing.

Breached Party: Labour Loses Confidence Due to Lack of Breach Security

The U.K. Revenue ministry has been leaking massive amounts of personal information, and now it's affected the ruling party:

The Government will face fresh questions over the loss of millions of voters' personal data amid evidence the debacle has helped fuel a massive slump in public confidence.

One poll showed those backing Labour's ability to handle economic problems had been more than halved to 28%, with just a quarter deeming Gordon Brown's administration "competent and capable".

And another gave the Tories a nine-point overall lead, its strongest position for 15 years, just weeks after Labour enjoyed an 11-point advantage in the same poll.

— Confidence in Labour 'plummets', Press Association, Guardian Unlimited, Friday November 23, 2007 7:03 AM

A government in risk of falling due to lack of breach security and perceived lack of technical confidence might be what it takes to get governments and industry to take breach security seriously. For example by requiring breach reporting.

-jsq