magazine

NEWS & VIEWS
© Rex
Spyware
tracking sees
dramatic
increase
The use of spyware to track a
partner’s movements, texts and
phone calls is on the rise.
A recent survey by UK domestic
violence charity Women’s Aid found
that 41% of domestic abuse victims
had been the subject of harassment
using electronic devices or spyware
that tracked their movements, calls
or texts.
“We increasingly hear stories of
abusers adding tracking software
to phones, placing spyware on
personal computers and using the
Internet to gather information about
their partner,” says Polly Neate, CEO
of Women’s Aid.
“In many cases the police are not
trained to recognize and understand
the impact of online abuse, including
tracking, and action is rarely taken
against abusers.”
THE TEAM
Three members of the team
behind the Windigo paper
share their stories.
ALEXIS DORAIS-JONCAS
An ESET employee since 2010, Alexis cocreated
the ESET Canada office back in
2011 and is currently security intelligence
team lead. Alexis lists the Festi botnet as
his most hated piece of malware.
Can we predict who will
fall for phishing scams?
By David Harley, Senior Research Fellow, ESET
User profiling is an interesting
approach to countering phishing.
But another – supplementary –
approach would be to analyze the
behavior of the PC user and use that
analysis to flag risky behavior and
attempt some sort of remediation.
One idea in a corporate product
would be to alert not only the user, but
the system administrator, who might
recommend training, for instance. In
a training tool, risky behavior might
be addressed by switching the subject
to a different, more intensive module.
I’d think that would be compatible
with the future research envisaged by
the authors of the paper Keeping Up
With the Joneses: “Assessing Phishing
Susceptibility In An Email Task”
presented by Kyung Wha Hong of North
Carolina State University.
In fact, there’s a great deal of academic
literature out there on susceptibility to
phishing. What is less clear to me is how
you develop a profile while avoiding the
pitfalls of stereotyping through oversimplification
of social representation.
The authors of the “Phishing
Susceptibility” paper seem to have
a profile in mind already. While it’s
unsurprising that dispositional trust
affects susceptibility to phishing,
the study also suggests that gender,
introversion and openness to new
experiences were also a factor.
However, it’s not always clear which
way those factors work – or indeed
how representative the population of
participants (53 American undergrads
aged between 18 and 27) is to the
population as a whole. Meanwhile, the
phishers keep honing their attacks.
MARC-ETIENNE M.LÉVEILLÉ
Marc-Etienne has been a malware
researcher at ESET since 2012 and
says his biggest Internet challenge is
malware that steals money and destroys
documents. Which explains
his interest in Windigo…
SÉBASTIEN DUQUETTE
A computer science graduate from
Université du Québec à Montréal,
Sébastien’s golden rule is ‘keep your
software up to date’. As a malware
researcher for ESET, he says exploit kits
are his biggest pet peeve.
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