Allow users to adopt a James Bond style deception mode when it comes to spotting spear phishing, said Zinaida Benenson.
Delivering a presentation on “How to Make People Click on a Dangerous Link Despite Their Security Awareness” at the Black Hat conference in Las Vegas, Zinaida Benenson, who leads the Human Factors in Security and Privacy Group at the IT Security Infrastructures Lab of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany, said that often people fall for the same things, and we don’t know how to “patch” them, or whether security awareness is the solution.
She said: “A lot of companies provide security awareness training, where they phish their own employees to assess security awareness and that is what I call ‘pen testing the humans’.” However she was keen to point out that pen testing people is not the same as pen testing machines, and this can go very wrong when a person finds out they are being used by their own security department for pen testing.
Research was presented to demonstrate a decent level of security knowledge in tests, and she said that we require people to be suspicious of messages even if they know sender, and even if it fits with their current situation and work and life practices.
“What we want from employees about spear phishing is to be in James Bond mode when there is a message deception mode,” she said.
“If we want security awareness training to be more effective, think of the price people (employees) have to pay. Be James Bond with false positives where they think message is phishing, and organizations will see the effects of not answering emails that they should have answered. Testing security awareness by sending from bosses destroys trust. It adds to shame which is not good for the organization.”
Benenson said that pen testing and patching humans is difficult, as people don’t think in the moment and talk to users, and switch into deception mode if they see something suspicious. She also encouraged delegates to stop sending legitimate emails that look “phishy”, and talk to people sending them. “People make mistakes and there is nothing we can do about it,” she said.
“Pen testing and patching humans is tricky, what do you want to be the consequence? Always ask for consent and the most important lesson for security professionals is talk to the users.”