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arXiv · 1901.00586

Draining the Water Hole: Mitigating Social Engineering Attacks with CyberTWEAK

Zheyuan Ryan Shi·Aaron Schlenker·Brian Hay·Daniel Bittleston·Siyu Gao·Emily Peterson·John Trezza·Fei Fang
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Abstract

Cyber adversaries have increasingly leveraged social engineering attacks to breach large organizations and threaten the well-being of today's online users. One clever technique, the "watering hole" attack, compromises a legitimate website to execute drive-by download attacks by redirecting users to another malicious domain. We introduce a game-theoretic model that captures the salient aspects for an organization protecting itself from a watering hole attack by altering the environment information in web traffic so as to deceive the attackers. Our main contributions are (1) a novel Social Engineering Deception (SED) game model that features a continuous action set for the attacker, (2) an in-depth analysis of the SED model to identify computationally feasible real-world cases, and (3) the CyberTWEAK algorithm which solves for the optimal protection policy. To illustrate the potential use of our framework, we built a browser extension based on our algorithms which is now publicly available online. The CyberTWEAK extension will be vital to the continued development and deployment of countermeasures for social engineering.

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Zheyuan Ryan Shi, Aaron Schlenker, Brian Hay, Daniel Bittleston, Siyu Gao, Emily Peterson, John Trezza, Fei Fang. 2019-01-03. Draining the Water Hole: Mitigating Social Engineering Attacks with CyberTWEAK. https://arxiv.org/abs/1901.00586

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