Scam Augmentation and Customization: Identifying Vulnerable Users and Arming Defenders

Abstract

Why do "classical"attacks such as phishing, IRS scams, etc., still succeed? How do attackers increase their chances of success? How do people reason about scams and frauds they face daily? More research is needed on these questions, which is the focus of this paper. We take a well-known attack, viz. company representative fraud, and study several parameters that bear on its effectiveness with a between-subjects study. We also study the effectiveness of a coherent language generation technique in producing phishing emails. We give ample room for the participants to demonstrate their reasoning and strategies. Unfortunately, our experiment indicates that participants are inadequately prepared for dealing with even the company representative fraud. Participants also could not differentiate between offers written by human or generated semi-automatically. Moreover, our results show attackers can easily increase their success rate by adding some basic information about the sender, so defenders should focus more on such attacks. We also observed that participants who paid attention to more clues were better in distinguishing legitimate messages from phishing, hence training regimes should check for reasoning strategies, not just who did not click on a link or download an attachment. Thus, insights from our work can help defenders in developing better strategies to evaluate their defenses and also in devising more effective training strategies.