There is measurable vulnerability in people who lack experience outside a single story. We documented this in terms of who falls victim to Advance Fee Fraud (419 scams) but it also applies to the AntiFa and BLM scams spreading lately. A story-teller on TED may explain it far better than I ever could: Army Captain … Continue reading Reduce Your Vulnerability to Fraud by Listening to More Stories
Update August 2020: Latest research can be found in a new blog post called Cultural Spectrum of Trust. My mother and I from 2006 to 2010 presented a linguistic analysis of the Advanced Fee Fraud (419 Scam). One of the key findings we revealed (also explained in other blog posts and our 2006 paper) is … Continue reading Linguistics as a Tool for Cyber Attack Attribution
At the RSA SF Conference in 2010 my mother and I presented a talk called “There’s No Patch for Social Engineering“. One of the key findings revealed in the talk (also explained in other blog posts and our 2006 paper) is that intelligence is not a reliable defense for social engineering. A press-release put it … Continue reading How Intelligence Makes You Vulnerable
Eight years ago, in 2003, we proposed and presented the use of linguistic analysis for email author identification. Our use case was started with the investigation of Advanced Fee Fraud (AFF), also known as 419 scams from Nigeria. We proved, albeit from a small data set, that language can identify a message author using several … Continue reading Exposing Anonymous With Frequent Pattern