The Hindu : National : Beware of cyber criminals’ psycho-games

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Monday, Jul 09, 2007
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National

Beware of cyber criminals’ psycho-games

Anand Parthasarathy

Bangalore: Users of social networking sites, the newest targets Internet and email users -- even the more Net-savvy among them – are falling prey to cyber criminals who increasingly use sophisticated psychological tactics to lure their victims and obtain sensitive personal and financial information.

In what is arguably the first study of its kind, James Blascovich, Professor of Psychology at the University of California, Santa Barbara in the U.S., has highlighted the psycho-games played by Internet baddies -- mostly through the mechanism of e-mail. First, they create the illusion of familiarity and legitimacy in the recipient -- sometimes going to elaborate lengths to create fake sites that look very similar to popular social networking portals like MySpace.com .

Then they create links from such sites to extract information like passwords or credit card numbers.

They also play on victims who are advancement focused -- or just plain greedy -- with subject lines like “You’ve won!" or "Instant payouts."

Embarrassment about physical shortcomings leads many to use the anonymity of the Web to solve their problems. They can easily be lured by headings like “Cure obesity!" or "Viagra". Ultimately the cat-and-mouse mind games are cold blooded financial scams -- Gartner reports that cumulative losses from such attacks, targeting sensitive information, rose to more than $ 2.8 billion in 2006, up from $ 137 million in 2004. What is the solution? At a basic level, it is better to eliminate most such spam with good filter software. But the baddies are getting better at fooling filters with short and innocuous-sounding subject lines. So the final test, says Dr Blascovich, is : “If a message is too good or too bad to be true —it probably is”

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