DEF CON 14 - Peter Gutmann: Phishing Tips and Techniques: Tackle, Rigging, and How & When to Phish
Channel: DEFCONConference
Date: 2014-02-06

Peter Gutmann: Phishing Tips and Techniques: Tackle, Rigging, and How & When to Phish

Abstract: This talk looks at the technical and psychological backgrounds behind why phishing works, and how this can be exploited to make phishing attacks more effective. To date, apart from the occasional use of psychology grads by 419 scammers, no-one has really looked at the wetware mechanisms that make phishing successful. Security technology doesn't help here, with poorly-designed user interfaces playing right into the phishers hands. After covering the psychological nuts and bolts of how users think and make decisions, the talk goes into specific examples of user behaviour clashing with security user interface design, and how this could be exploited by attackers to bypass security speedbumps that might be triggered by phishing attacks. Depending on your point of view, this is either a somewhat hair-raising cookbook for more effective phishing techniques, or a warning about how these types of attacks work and what needs to be defended against. (Warning: Talk may contain traces of cognitive psychology. Keep away from small children). 

Bio: Peter Gutmann is a researcher in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Auckland, New Zealand, working on the design and analysis of cryptographic security architectures. He helped write the popular PGP encryption package, has authored a number of papers and RFC's on security and encryption including the X.509 Style Guide for certificates, and is the author of "Cryptographic Security Architecture: Design and Verification" (published by Springer-Verlag) and the open source cryptlib security toolkit. In his spare time he pokes holes in whatever security systems and mechanisms catch his attention and grumbles about PKIs and the (un-)usability of security applications.