Im sorry, but that is the typical tech reply that blows normal people's minds. Blame the user. Well, the user says, sod that, lets just block the problem and get on with what we wanted to do in the first place.
People, normal non tech people, want to use computers as a tool, not become experts in thwarting criminals, etc. If a user cant just go to a computer and simply use it, like say a library or book, then the computer and its champions are failing. Its not the users job to provide security. And no, its not like locking a door. The sheer amount of rubbish poor users have to go through to be safe on a computer is frankly a joke, and the reason so many non geeks love Apple. Yes geeks know Apple are as insecure and any one else, but users believe they are simple and safe.
(At this point, by all means picture a toddler going mental in a shop)
I've been in this business for 30 years, and "train the users" is for me a 30 year mantra that no one out side of geekdom wants to hear. It was my job to enable them to do their job more efficiently, not expect them to become some sort of security expert.
This Uni is doing the simple easy thing to let its users function safely. If the IT world doens't like it, then 1: tough, 2: damn well fix it, and 3: stop blaming users.
Then, you tell them to limit emails. "Oh right" says the user, "I thought one point of email was easy mass mailing, and now you want to bloke it?"
Really think about the user. Its they who make computers and the internet worth bothering with.
I feel better now. Thank you.
Regardless of what some folks in the "User Friendly" movement would like to think, most tools require basic instruction in order to be safely used. We can't code away all individual responsibility.
In your analogy, it's like saying "people shouldn't be allowed to use cars unless they can verify the hydraulic pressure in the master brake cylinder"
Which is wrong: manufacturers should (and did) install brakes warning lights. And we need to come up with better warnings for users. Blaming them for these sorts of problems is unacceptable.
1) Did you click a link from an email? 2) Does the page it redirect you to ask for your login info?
You may have received a phishing email. Are either true?
1) You expected this email because you were notified about it from another source e.g. website, support staff. 2) If you login to the website not via the suspicious link, the linked web page does not ask for your login.
If you answered yes, you probably don't have a phishing email.
"You expected this email" is also not a hard test to pass in either academia or corporate settings, where users are generally besieged by unsolicted instructions to "Go here, do this, hurry up about it".
Similarly, 'cookies' are 'scary' - there's no visual indication in a browser of what's going on with cookies, what they are, what they hold - you have to dig deep in 'preferences' then 'advanced' or 'security'. Instead of easier to use tools, we get legislation around cookies. WTF?
Don't get me started on certificates...
Here are some regular people's experiences of scams.
(http://www.moneywise.co.uk/scams-rip-offs/scams/scam-watch-t...)
#1 - Yes, some scams are reasonably sophisticated.
(http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2012/may/23/credit-card-user...)
Computers have taken over the world precisely because we have worked very hard to make them approachable by mere mortals. The only reason Google matters is that they figured out how to make the search engine much more user friendly. Apple is on top of the world because they made a more user-friendly music player, phone, and portable computer. And we HNers are all getting paid stupid amounts of money because the wide adoption of computing has created high demand.
Nobody is talking about coding away individual responsibility. They're talking about removing another bit of pointless friction from the system, so that the tools are more effective for the tool-users.
And I'll add that cars are heading in exactly the direction that you lampoon. If the car industry had thought like you, they'd still be back on hand-cranking to start the car, needing to maintain the battery's water level, and having to wear goggles. And soon Google will have solved the driving problem, mainly thanks to the way consumer adoption has driven down the costs of computing.
A taxi is what the end user is looking for when they want to go from location A to location B without specialist training.
So if you fall for email phishing attacks despite training, then you shouldn't be trusted with mass email rights. Likewise, the admins have an obligation to control those resources, and to train users. (If that's too hard to expect, then we need to find out why.)
Point is, users should get the blame for their fuckups-- when they fuck up. It's not an all-or-nothing thing.
For instance, how about if the login page says in big bold letters: "This is the ONLY page you should ever enter your password on." With this tiny change, moderately competent users are much better protected from phishing attempts that use something like Google Docs forms... although that still hasn't protected them from something like a hand-crafted phishing site. Other techniques can help with this: for example, you could offer a bounty: pay real dollars for the first person to report any phishing site resembling your login page.
Some steps are up to the user, but instead of BLAMING the user, make it EASY for the user.
Were the IT dept. folks thinking about the user, they would never have blocked Google Docs in the first place. People want to use tool X, so the job of university IT is to ensure they are able to use tool X. They did exactly the opposite.
Also, solutions proposed by GP are reasonable ways to reduce / mitigate the risk of phishing without inconveniencing users too much.
In this particular case, the department is in a double bind: the success of phishing emails threatens the ability of the university to send email to many other major hosts on the net. If you sat the users down and asked them which they need more, a reliable email to people outside the university or access to Google Docs, then the decision isn't so clear cut all of a sudden is it?
But it's a false dichotomy: there are solutions that preserve both.
20 years earlier, wouldn't you have expected an office secretary to not send postal mail to everyone in the city? Or give the cabinet keys with the petty cash to anyone who dressed like his/her boss?
Perhaps a better approach to "training the users" might be for the University to actively attempt to phish its own users on a regular basis.
Those who fall for the phishing could be contacted directly, or have email access limited for some period of time (for example, a reduced sending rate limit).
Making self-phishing a regular occurrence (say, weekly) would train users to recognise and ignore it.
My 'idea of the month' was to turn down the auto-lock time from 10 minutes down to 1 or 2. Wouldn't eliminate it, but generally, people at their desk were using their computer anyway, so it wasn't a big deal, and if you were called away and forgot, the auto-lock would kick in pretty quickly.
My bad... I never intended to suggest "blame the user".
> If a user cant just go to a computer and simply use it, like say a library or book, then the computer and its champions are failing. Its not the users job to provide security.
If I ran a library and I found that my visitors were just passing the same library card around to everyone in line, even strangers, instead of having each person get their own card, then I would say we needed some user education. We wouldn't need to issue special biometric IDs with a 22-step process to check out a book... but we would need to tell people "Hey, get your own card!"
Similarly, if I find that my IT system users are entering their login passwords in ANYTHING other than the login box (particularly online forms), then I have failed them -- I have failed to educate them about basic use of the systems. I should correct that, by coming to them and letting them know that I will NEVER ask for their password in ANY place other than the login form, and that they shouldn't enter it anywhere else.
> Then, you tell them to limit emails. "Oh right" says the user, "I thought one point of email was easy mass mailing, and now you want to bloke it?"
Actually, I wouldn't do it that way. I would set reasonable quotas (say, 100 outgoing emails before our rate limiting kicks in). After that, I would have it slow the rate of email sending, not block it. And if any user had sent enough that their mails were getting delayed, I'd also trigger a message to them inviting them to contact IT if they had special needs for mass emails. (We could change their quota, either temporarily or permanently, depending on what they were trying to accomplish.)
> Really think about the user.
Extremely good advice. I agree with your rant.
We can't eliminate all possible danger and coat the world in foam rubber because someone people are accident prone.
That's not user-driven logic, that's bureaucrat logic, and pushing for education as a way to mitigate the dangers isn't some kind of 'geek logic' that mainstream people couldn't be bothered with, it's very simple logic.
There are infinite threats. We all have our own whitelists and blacklists.
I don't want to live in a world without electricity, cars, swimming pools, stairs, and knives because some people may hurt themselves, because I may even hurt myself.
Potentially getting fucked over should be in the TOS for human life. Click here to agree or sit in the corner and make collages with non-toxic glue, magazines full of approved harmless imagery, and safety scissors.
that's the hardest nut and that's the income comes. blocking some sources is simply easy. " We found Google Docs brings more and more phishing, OK let's just block it and sorry and apologize to our users." " We found again zoho brings more and more phishing, Ok let's block it too." Well, we will find more like this situation.
Oh, it's scary! Let's just block the internet and turn on our TV...
And yes, that means not putting in the password when they click a link. Only when they access the website themselves.
On the other hand I see plenty of 25+ people that don't care too much to change their status quo. I might as well be one of them and pretend I'm not.
No solution is perfect, but GP's are certainly better.
This demonstrably doesn't work. It reduces but cannot eliminate all instances of phishing.
> Don't give your users credentials. Have some alternate way to authenticate them like a login token.
Better, but scrounging up a few million pounds for dongles, plus the non-stop cost and effort of replacing lost and stolen dongles, is not easy for a university, no matter how famous.
> Put rate limiting on the ability of a single account to send out emails.
Many users have legitimate reasons to send out mass emails.
> Instead of blocking the site that was collecting the credentials, a better solution would have been to remove the email from the mailboxes of all the students.
Phishing emails are often varied into multiple templates to avoid being scrubbed this way.
They also tend to trickle in at random, rather than turning up all at once.
Doesn't solve the problem of users without smart phones though, which I imagine is still not ignorable at most universities.
The next step would be to filter outbound traffic to block SMTP from compromised PCs. It seems they have an outbound firewall, but it's not obvious which ports are closed because the list of blocked ports is ... blocked[1].
[0] http://blogs.oucs.ox.ac.uk/adamweblearn/2011/12/weblearn-una...
You're a lecturer with 200 people in your class. That's 2 days. Does the lecturer have to leave their computer all the time? Is their email programme going to handle this sort of delay? What do you do if the lecturer wants to send an email about updated homework due in a few days? Some students will have a 2 day head start, is that fair? Do you have to give them extra time/marks?
You're the first year faculty advisor. There are 1,000 people in that year. That's 1 week. Same questions as above.
(And in case you think "Well let the lecturers send more", what makes you think the lecturers aren't the problem in the first place?)
Calls for Papers / Articles is the classic reason. The IEEE and the ACM might have proper mailing lists for that sort of business ... most academic fields do not.
Edit: I think they could lower the rate more and push mailing lists, but on the other hand a lot of users simply wouldn't notice that they're rate limited. Which could lead to entirely different brand of lulz.
Additionally, what OSes will these dongles support? Would you rather "Oxford University bans Windows XP"? or "Oxford University bans iPhones"? etc.
As far as email, there are several things to consider: One, that I would think it a rarity for a student, or even a teacher! to need to send a single email to more than a handful of /external/ email addresses at a time. Put an email firewall in place between your internal and external systems, and have IT security monitor that system for peaks in traffic. Single users sending outbound mail a lot. Obviously, there should be a spam filter going in AND out.
And yes, spam email does trickle in sometimes, and from different SMTP servers, but from the bit I've dealt with them, there are definite patterns that a person can pick up on when they're watching for it.
I manage barely a 100 users and I have talked to each of them personally. They're good people and can comprehend instructions. But they still fall for these every now and then. Training doesn't help. They are fantastic in their respective fields but to them, all prompt boxes and all login screens have the same exact amount of legitimacy. Just like how every spark plug looks the same to me. Training can help some users but most of them are going to fall for it eventually.
It is 2013, two factor authentication is here and it is open source software. You can use Google Authenticator[1] for free or you can use something like the YubiKey[2]. If the students have a smartphone then Google Authenticator is on almost all of the major platforms.
This is what I mean: http://www.neowin.net/news/microsoft-explains-why-outlookcom...
With Google Apps you just turn it on... and can force users to use it.
Office 365 and stand alone (ie: private) exchange installs certainly support it.
Comparing outlook.com to 'Microsoft Exchange' (whether you're talking about Office 365 which is MS's 'cloud' solution, or private Exchange servers) is not exactly fair. One is designed as a free email hosting solution for personal use (essentially replacing Hotmail), the other is designed for business/organizational use and costs money.
How do you actually suggest this be done? Seriously? Classes? OK what's the estimated success rate of that class (i.e. how many people will go to the class, then ignore all the advice)? 80%? What do you do about the 20% who haven't been 'trained'? What next? Computer licences? How long will that take, and again, how many people will ignore it?
If misleading messages ("phishing") are leading their users to enter credentials onto forms which are then used to send out spam, then the solution is not to block access to one of the sites that supports forms. There are an unlimited number of sites that support forms. There are LOTS of better ways to solve this problem. Here are a few:
* Train your users where it is and isn't safe to enter credentials.
* Don't give your users credentials. Have some alternate way to authenticate them like a login token.
* Put rate limiting on the ability of a single account to send out emails.
Blocking the site for just a few hours as an emergency response to a short-term attack is a much more reasonable approach. Sometimes, to react quickly, you need to take measures that are not the best possible choice. But there were better approaches, and the security team should take measures to ensure that they can react more effectively next time. For instance, in this case, a single mass-email or email "virus" had gone out and was tempting a large number of users to give out their credentials. Instead of blocking the site that was collecting the credentials, a better solution would have been to remove the email from the mailboxes of all the students. After all, the emails system is provided by the university, and this cuts off the problem at the root. They should institute the necessary technology to support doing this next time they have a phishing problem... perhaps they can even do this proactively: set up some honeypot accounts not receiving any legitimate emails and automatically destroy any emails matching the signature of emails received by these honeypot accounts (with manual review afterward to correct for false positives).