BUFFALO, N.Y. – Arun Vishwanath, PhD, associate professor
in the Department of Communication at University at Buffalo, has
received a three-year $320,000 grant from the National Science
Foundation to launch a research project to learn just how people
fall victim to cyber-phishing attacks and what tools can be used to
protect them.
His partner in the study is H. Raghav Rao, PhD, SUNY
Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Management
Science and Systems in the UB School of Management, where
Vishwanath is an adjunct associate professor. The two will partner
with other organizations, including the National Consumer League,
in conducting the study.
Phishing is the familiar scam in which Internet fraudsters send
spam or pop-up messages aimed at drawing personal and financial
information from unsuspecting victims. Once they acquire
personal information, phishers can sometimes get into the
victim’s other online personal and business accounts as
well.
Vishwanath, an expert in consumer behavior and information
processing, says research like this is necessary and important
because, at its core, every recent major cyber attack has involved
a phishing scam. Phishing makes important private information
available to hackers, which in turn can be used to facilitate those
attacks.
“Phishing has become the attack vector of choice among
cyber criminals and their incidence has gone up
significantly,” he says. “We all are vulnerable and
through us, so are government and commercial institutions,
including security agencies and news sources.
“Such attacks are on the rise,” Vishwanath says,
“and are more successful than people realize.”
He cites such examples as the April attack on the AP Twitter
feed that resulted in it disseminating “news” of a
White House bombing in which the president was injured. Another
example, he says, was the August take-down of The New York Times
website by the pro-Assad “Syrian Electronic Army.”
“Besides these,” he says, “a host of recent
attacks on news outlets such as The Washington Post, The Wall
Street Journal, The New York Times, CBS, BBC and NPR have all been
attributed to phishing attacks.”
Vishwanath’s recent research employed an integrated
information-processing model to test individual differences in
vulnerability to phishing.
“This project,” he says, “will evaluate the
relative efficacy of this model in helping us understand how to
stop such attacks from victimizing people, and the relative
effectiveness of using anti-phishing toolbars and
phishing-awareness training to protect the public.”