But IMHO, I think that HTML e-mail should be outlawed, period. That
alone might go a long way to eliminating a lot of phishing schemes,
especially the ones that rely on bugs in the MUA's HTML rendering
engine to entice the victims.
I would vote for certain large software corporations to do a better job
in QA before they release their email clients (and maybe filter out some
bad design ideas too). But the point is that HTML e-mail isn't any more
dangerous in and of itself than __important__ or **important**, except
for poorly designed software. Fixing the software is Easy, taking away
something that people like is Hard.
Besides, if HTML was removed from the equation, you'd still have crafy
text email:
Dear Consumer,
We here are Bank of America.. blah blah blah.
We set up a special server for you to validate your account:
http://www.malware.com/BankOfAmerica
People are easy to fool.
--
Michael Scovetta
Computer Associates
Senior Application Developer
-----Original Message-----
From: Rishi Pande [mailto:rishi.pande@gmail.com]
Sent: Monday, January 24, 2005 3:08 PM
To: Wall, Kevin
Cc: Mike Andrews; webappsec@securityfocus.com
Subject: Re: (not really a) Proposal to anti-phishing
I like the quiz but there is no data on participants. My whole point in
finding who is more susceptible to phishing was to see if perhaps the
online banking problem would solve itself after some years - as more
and more young, internet-savvy users start using these services.
As much as I like Kevin's idea, it is difficult to recall something
that users and corporations like just because of "security". As long as
the profits from sending better looking emails are higher than the
losses, corporations will be willing to take it.
Just my $0.02.
Rishi
On Jan 24, 2005, at 2:28 PM, Wall, Kevin wrote:
Mike Andrews writes...
I remember doing a quiz on phishing some time ago. After much
digging,
here's a link to the quiz (version 2)
http://survey.mailfrontier.com/survey/quiztest.html
Sorry, it doesn't give any results of the survey - perhaps someone
could
email the company and ask about the results, especially which ones
people
didn't get.
Of course, the "quiz" is pretty much useless. There are some obvious
phishing attempts, but the few that look (are?) legitimate, one can't
really tell because all they give you is an image, so you can't really
see what the links are pointing to or do a 'view source', etc.
Of course, the point should be one should ALWAYS go to the the
web site directly to type in the appropriate URL (if they know
what it is; otherwise look up their site on a search engine
and then type it in).
But IMHO, I think that HTML e-mail should be outlawed, period. That
alone
might go a long way to eliminating a lot of phishing schemes,
especially
the ones that rely on bugs in the MUA's HTML rendering engine to
entice
the victims.
-kevin wall
