Understanding scam victims: Seven principles for systems security

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• Frank Stajano, University of Cambridge
• Tuesday 17 November 2009, 16:15-17:15
• Lecture Theatre 2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building.

If you have a question about this talk, please contact Joseph Bonneau.

The success of many attacks on computer systems can be traced back to the security engineers not understanding the psychology of the system users they meant to protect. We examine a variety of scams and “short cons” that were investigated, documented and recreated for the BBC TV programme “The Real Hustle” and we extract from them some general principles about the recurring behavioural patterns of victims that hustlers have learnt to exploit.

We argue that an understanding of these inherent “human factors” vulnerabilities, and the necessity to take them into account during design rather than naïvely shifting the blame onto the “gullible users”, is a fundamental paradigm shift for the security engineer which, if adopted, will lead to stronger and more resilient systems security.

You can read the full tech report here:

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/techreports/UCAM-CL-TR-754.pdf

This talk is part of the Computer Laboratory Security Seminar series.

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• Computer Laboratory Security Seminar
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• Lecture Theatre 2, Computer Laboratory, William Gates Building
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