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Comment by walrus01 | Hacker News Reader

This is why all staff, whether at a corporation, nonprofit or government that handle money should be put through a two hour anti-phishing training course. There's lots of good free training material out there.

There are also services which you can hire. You give them a list of staff emails, and they send test phishes to everyone. Those who respond or click on links (there's a GUID in each phish) can be sent for further remedial training.

As a person that's been seeing and analyzing spurious SMTP traffic since 1993, this stuff seems obvious, but there's a lot of blithely ignorant people out there in administrative roles.

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While I think everyone should be aware of phishing, I don't think any amount of education can reliably prevent this sort of fraud. I see this fundamentally as a process problem, as I assume email was a common way of changing payment information. Email needs to be taken out of the loop.

> I don't think any amount of education can reliably prevent this sort of fraud.

The (possibly remedial) education isn't to prevent the fraud, it's to make your population more resistant to it.

At some point in the far future if it's part of basic education courses, then we may create herd inoculation effect where phishing fraud may become unprofitable enough to further depress likelihood (like highway banditry of days yore).

Email will never go away - it will always be some part of the payment process even if it's just remittance. It's too ubiquitous.

I wonder if GPG could have ensured this didn't happen.

When you use Microsoft Safelinks URL rewriter you preclude cryptographic signing. The Safelinks crap is just crap, it obfuscates URLs and you can't sign your messages any longer.

Obviously it could of if applied correctly. That's an interesting point in general. People are still using insecure communications with no sender verification while doing business here in the 21st century.

I disagree. Taking email out of the loop is a technical solution to a problem that is inherently social, not technical.

I don't see it as a technical solution, but fixing a broken process.

But the process is broken by people not realizing that invoices are fraudulent. The method of delivery, be that email or some other system, is completely orthogonal.

Running their invoices through SAP or having gpg signed pdf invoices or using more node.js would not help because all of those solutions fail to address the fact that people are dumb and need to be trained to avoid scams.

If a (insert centralized service here) friend tells me about a change of plans, and I know that messages with that contact were successful in the past, then plans indeed changed because it's spoof-proof so long as you didn't make friends with two accounts that end up sharing a name and so long as the sender didn't fall victim to phishing of creds.

If an email from a contact comes in, the from/sender headers can be spoofed without anyone having fallen victim yet, so maybe plans didn't really change.

Yes there are social aspects but there is also this plainly technical aspect.

All you've done is moved the problem from your organization to theirs.

Phishing can still pwn you.

True, but making credential theft a prerequisite is helpful.

Yes, the problem is people on the paying side not realizing that payment change requests are fraudulent. So a better process removes people on the paying side routinely changing payment information. Require that payees sign into a separate service and they change the payment information themselves.

Again I think that just slapping a new service in there doesn't address the fundamental problem which is that the university did not conduct sufficient verification of payment details before sending out 12 million dollars.

All it would have taken is a phone call to the company's accounting department confirming the change.

"Verification of changes to banking details as a service" is not the answer. It's a Band-Aid solution.

And my perspective is that as long as you have a process where administrative staff are making the changes, they will cut corners. For them, these transfers are routine. They do dozens every month. You need a process which removes them from the loop.

As is, say, bathing.

Useless, pedantic innuendo

It only requires one black swan to counter the proposition that all swans are white. Bathing is my swan. Surely it's clear that a direct contradiction is not "innuendo." Nor pedantic - hardly, since everyone is familiar with bathing. (They didn't have to be familiar with the philosopher of science Hempel's writings - the origin of the black swan remark, here - to understand the contradiction.)

Honestly at this juncture I haven't a clue what your point is. At no time have you offered anything resembling a direct contradiction.

Instead of vague implications and analogies, just state your opinion clearly.

So much abuse yet here's what I was replying to: "Taking email out of the loop is a technical solution to a problem that is inherently social, not technical." The clear implication being that you can't solve social problems with tech, but we do this all the time and have, forever, as my example shows. Q.E.D.

Inherently social problems are commonly solved by technical interventions, e.g. distressing human smells by bathing or perfuming.

Did that really need rererepeating? No, the point was clear the in first instance, you just disagreed and preferred vituperation it to addressing my point. People who just gainsay here annoy me, but you've hit a new low.

>No, the point was clear the in first instance

It most certainly was not and still isn't. Drop your holier-than-thou attitude and you might actually make some friends on the internet.

Pretty much all you said was "bathing". It was not clear to what you were replying. It was not clear what your point was. It was not clear what you were implying.

Bathing is not a social problem that I'm aware of. We as a species have been bathing for more than 4000 years and have been doing it fundamentally the same way (wash body with water and potentially with soap or other solvent) for most of that time. There have been no major technological advances in bathing that I'm aware of since perhaps the invention of the shower. I would argue that is not a technical solution to a social problem.

In any case, this entire farcical tangent has nothing to do with the social dynamic of fraudsters exploiting weaknesses in the human psyche, and I think you know that.

I am convinced you are just trolling and will not respond again.

Astonished, sir.

Note that in this particular case the email in question had a signed document attached. So the scam could of been done with regular mail.The problem here was the lack of verification, not the medium of communication.

The ease of forging emails is more of an issue where the spear phish email is trying to disguise itself as coming from inside the company.

Which is why I said it's a process problem. But you definitely want email out of the process since it's not reliable.

OK, but what would you replace it with that was more reliable? If a company takes the time to, say, use GPG then email is probably the most reliable method available.

A service where the payees have to sign in and change the payment information themselves.

At IBM they would randomly send people phish mails, if you clicked on them you landed on the site that provided remedial training! I always thought this would be a good service to offer companies. You could call it "Phish for Compliance" :-)

We're getting some here. The first time it happened, everyone received an email, so the first to click on the link warned the other not too.

there's a company called phishme which does this as a service.

While my mother was in the hospital several weeks ago for an elective surgery, I was walking the halls and noticed the screen savers on the nurse's terminals. There was a rotating screen that warned against phishing and gave a website to report any possible fraudulent inbound emails.

Can you link to some of these materials?

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