Is My Credit Card Stolen? (A ruse to educate people about phishing) | Hacker News Reader

Is My Credit Card Stolen? (A ruse to educate people about phishing)

ismycreditcardstolen.com

88 pointsAngryParsley38 comments

Interesting concept!

I'd remove the negativity from the start. Putting "This is a test, you have failed it" right in front of folks is an instant turn-off, and might lead people away from your page instead of to the helpful content below.

More bullet points. There's not a whole lot of text there now, but anything you can do to get the message across with fewer words is a win, especially when dealing with non-technical folks.

Under "look at the address bar", you have: A common phishing trick is to have a domain like amazon.com.not.ru, which steals your credentials when you try to log in. The actual domain in this example is "not.ru," but people often only check to see if the string "amazon.com" is anywhere in the address bar.

I'd change that to not use the word "string" since non-tech-folks don't parse that very well, and maybe include screenshots of an address bar containing the real Amazon.com and a phishing site disguised as Amazon.

Still though, good idea!

Thanks for the suggestions. If you want to make changes, you can fork http://github.com/pquerna/darwintest .

Edit: I used the "you fail" message because I think it makes people more likely to remember it. I wanted to say something like "your credit card has been stolen. kthxbye." but that would have caused some false alarms.

It's hard to have a memorable message without it causing offense or panic.

Also on my TODO: add a counter for those who put 16 digits in the credit card field.

Extra edit: nfriendly: Thanks for the styling suggestion.

On the same vein as the post above, a little vertical spacing between the bullet points would go a long way toward improving readability:

  li { margin:12px 0; }

"If asked for your password, do not give it out. Real websites will never ask you for your password. (Login forms excepted, of course.)"

This is confusing, in my opinion. It's hard to explain the difference between a login form and a page asking for your password, so it's probably worth just leaving this out. Any phisher worth his salt makes the page asking for a password look like a login form anyway.

You're right. It will be fixed whenever pquerna gets back from the Cassandra get-together.

1) Create an online form that doesn't take input, and call it "educational".

2) Get a bunch of educated people to review it for 3-5 days and approve of it.

3) Wait until the educated people send links of this to their non-internet literate friends, for education, shits and harmless giggles.

4) Switch to a live form that captures data.

5) ...

6) Profit

Clever idea, but it's not hard to find out the identities of those behind this site. They'd get busted for fraud pretty quickly.

Could you perhaps write some Javascript to check the check digit and submit just whether it was correct or not? Then you could have some stats on how many people are gullible vs. just curious.

You know what, this is a phisher's dream. Even if we could trust this website for not saving the data, the connection is a regular non-secure connection, so all somebody would have to do is catch some open wireless connections or similar.

we have applied for an SSL certificate, from both GoDaddy and Comodo.

they are both 'pending', since apparently, having 'credit card' in your domain is suspicious: http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/anti-phishing.jpg

I'm not convinced that this will help so much here. Assuming that victims won't be checking for SSL, getting someone to an insecure copy of the site will do. I don't see how this would be your problem, though.

Security is a strange beast.

View the HTML source. The credit card inputs aren't part of the form. They're never sent across the wire.

This doesn't matter. If the connection is intercepted, the credit card inputs suddenly can be part of the form.

That's true for any non-https site. They could inject stuff into wellsfargo.com or whatever.

Perhaps a keylogger's dream, but then I suppose you would have two problems. And regex would not be one of them.

Another way this could be a good scheme is if people trust it and start sending it as a way to educate people, and when it starts getting momentum, it is changed and does start recording numbers.

The site's started to hit Firefox's "Reported Web Forgery!" page...

"This web page at ismycreditcardstolen.com has been reported as a web forgery and has been blocked based on your security preferences."

How responsible is this if you allow the domain to expire someday - or your email gets hacked and a foreign party takes control over your domain name?

I havent particularly been following it, but is there any real solution to phishing? with punycode domains and arbitrary tld's, along with characters that look the same in a lot of fonts, l and I, people need a cs degree to figure out if they are being phished.

I guess paypal and a small number of verified payment processors, (or real online banking) are about the only option.

Single-use credit card numbers (and one-time passwords) would help a ton. Multifactor authentication of any kind would also be good. The problem with all of these ideas is that they're harder to use than fixed CC numbers and passwords.

I do like the convenience of being able to memorize a password or CC number though.

Yes, Use bookmarks on a trusted computer or better yet type any sensitive domains. Typing www.paypal.com is easy.

Yes, and it's very simple. Don't type anything important unless you also typed the URL into the address bar. Plenty of real mail from reputable, very phishable, sites actually say exactly this in their real emails-to-customers sometimes.

Laziness, of course, is a problem also.

Last week, I posted something similar to proggit using the youtube redirect exploit.

During its three-hour run, nearly 6000 people (20%) tried to give me their google account credentials.

http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/bpy7h/think_you...

This is remarkably similar to the site my friend Leon set up, which he artfully called "Creditcardology" - see http://secretgeek.net/cco/CCO.HTM

They are banned now...

So anti-phishing folks got accused for phishing. Looks it was technically nice idea but terrible user experience.

Unless of course there WAS a hidden agenda here.

Okay, that explains why I couldn't understand what you guys were talking about and all I got was a "Warning: Suspected phishing site!"

I submitted no data and it still said I failed the test?

I guess you're not supposed to submit these kind of forms, even if empty.

Nah, I'm just lazy and didn't write any JavaScript to validate the inputs.

Edit: yeah I would normally never use JS for validation.

You rely on JavaScript to validate your inputs?

Edit: although I suppose you can have an exception in this case :-)

The form that you submitted contained no fields, only a submit button. It has no way of knowing that you didn't type in any data.

I tried to find a way to pass the test and couldn't. Could someone explain to me how to pass?

A strange game. The only winning move is not to play.

That's strange, e-mail me your credit card info and I'll verify it manually.

Aha! Online credit-card-information catcher?

I'll mail this link to my mom right away.

The meat of the site is this page: http://ismycreditcardstolen.com/check.html

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