Want Personal Data? Go Phish!

At least 2 million people received the email May 16 2013 notifying them that an order they had just made on "Wallmart's" website was being processed, though none of them had done any such thing.

Still, thousands of people clicked on the link in the email, taking many of them to a harmless Google search results page for "Walmart." Others weren't so fortunate.

The link led to the invisible download of malware that covertly infected their personal computers, turning them into remotely controlled robots for hackers.

Phishing, also known as “brand spoofing” or “carding”, is a term used to describe various scams that use (primarily) fraudulent e-mail messages, sent by criminals, to trick you into divulging personal information. The criminals use this information to steal your identity, rob your bank account, or take over your computer.

With spear-phishing they use social engineering – researching social media and other publicly available online sources – to profile high value targets and personalize bogus emails. Broader phishing campaigns may engage partners in crime to conduct high volume mailings, but very realistic looking emails will invariably hook a significant number of users who will download a malformed spreadsheet or click on a link to a fraudulent website.

Make no mistake, phishing and spear-phishing works. RSA recently reported that in 2013 there were nearly 450,000 phishing attacks and estimated losses of over $5.9 billion.

Even before phishing became so prevalent, legitimate businesses and financial institutions would hardly ever ask for personal information via e-mail. If you receive such a request, call the organization and ask if it's legitimate or check its legitimate Web site. Look for misspellings and bad grammar. While an occasional typo can slip by any organization, more than one is a tip-off to beware.

In the fake-Wal-Mart attack, people missed clear warning signs — such as the company name being misspelled and the sender's address being very long and strange.

The success of phishing is largely determined by the low levels of user-awareness regarding how the companies which fraudsters try to imitate, operate. Many legitimate sites contain special warnings saying that they never ask users to send confidential data in messages. However, users continue to send their passwords to phishers.

Phishing is a modern hydra, cut of one head and two more grows out. The only way to actually combat phishing is with awareness and to starve it out. I personally think this is a result of the young age of the Internet; people are simply not accustomed to online scammers the same way we are local market hustlers. In a few years phishing and scamming will probably have malnourished itself out of existence, but until then we all need to be aware. 

Please don't feed the phish. 

Praising Intelligence might Undermine Development

Yes, you read that right. Praising intelligence may not evolve the thinking ability, but rather have quite the opposite effect, possibly halting it all together. This startling discovery was recently publicized by Claudia M. Mueller, Carol S. Dweck from Columbia University and Sheri R. Levy, Stanford University.

The study compares the performance of children after they’ve been praised for their intelligence (“you must be smart”) versus their effort (“you must have put a lot of effort into that”). The kids were asked to perform a task, and upon completion they were praised in one of the two manners. After this they where then given a series of harder problems to try to solve.

The kids who where praised for their effort increased in the number of problems they solved. However, those who where told that they were smart showed a frightening decrease.

What’s the difference? Those being told that they’re smart are taught that abilities are fixed. If you’re finding a puzzle hard, then it must be because you’re not very good at that, and you should try something else. Kids taught that results are based on effort see the hard puzzles as something they can learn to do, and then they do so.

In a second set of tests, kids were asked what type of puzzles they like to solve, and then given four options. The first three were pretty similar: “problems that aren’t too hard, so I don’t get many wrong,” “problems that are pretty easy, so I’ll do well,” and “problems that I’m pretty good at, so I can show that I’m smart.” 

However the last option is different: “problems that I’ll learn a lot from, even if I won’t look so smart.”

The first three options are “performance” options, they’re all about looking good, or getting things right. The last option is a “learning” option, and it values knowledge and growth over performance.

The study concluded that children often selected puzzle-options based upon the type of praise they had previously gotten. Children praised for their intelligence choose tasks which are easy and make them look good, but children praised for their effort choose tasks which are hard, and which will teach them more.

Do you think about praise and feedback, and how you direct it? Comment below...