Cyber Thieves Continue to Best Technology

The growing sophistication of phishing scams is making it increasingly hard for even perceptive computer users to avoid potential problems online. Some phishing emails now scan the browser history, identify which websites were recently visited and automatically configure themselves to look like the user’s own financial institution. When an email comes from a familiar institution, it significantly boosts the odds that the recipient will respond, experts concur.

Lorrie Faith Cranor, associate professor of computer science and engineering & public policy at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, describes the problem as misplaced trust. “When Internet users are asked to make ‘trust’ decisions they often make the wrong decision,” she explains.

Trust, it turns out, has a lot to do with the online experience for most computer users. “Implicit trust decisions include decisions about whether or not to open an email attachment or provide information in response to an email that claims to have been sent by a trusted entity. Explicit trust decisions are decisions made in response to specific trust or security-related prompts such as pop-up boxes that ask the user whether to trust an expired certificate, execute downloaded software, or allow macros to execute,” Cranor says.