[FRIAM] "Drop box" phishing

Barry MacKichan barry.mackichan at mackichan.com
Thu Mar 23 11:31:44 EDT 2017


What you say is reasonable, especially since I’m frequently running 
VMs anyway. For now, a simple rule for me is that nobody can send me a 
Dropbox file without first sending an email personally or calling me on 
the phone. Simple and it works.

--Barry


On 22 Mar 2017, at 14:25, glen ☣ wrote:

> It seems like someone could make it sufficiently easy to isolate the 
> highest risk interfaces in a VM or container.  E.g. rather than 
> double-clicking on a native email app (or web browser) to read your 
> email, you'd double-click on a native host program that launches a 
> container for the email app (or web browser).  Then you contain the 
> infection (or ransomable content) within the container.  Of course, 
> that assumes two things: 1) a staged backup of the container image and 
> 2) an easy path to purposefully move valid data out of the container 
> and into the rest of your work environment.
>
> Sure, data that looks valid could still creep out.  But it would help 
> with those "uh-oh, I clicked on the wrong thing" episodes.  Here are 
> several containers one could use:
>
>   http://linoxide.com/how-tos/20-docker-containers-desktop-user/
>
> It seems so obvious, either I'm missing something significant or such 
> a convenience already exists somewhere.  Perhaps here:
>
>   https://bufferzonesecurity.com/product/how-it-works/
>
> But that seems very "enterprisy" or "sledgehammery".  I'd think one 
> could do a personal version merely with a little clever scripting.
>
>
> On 03/22/2017 12:44 PM, Barry MacKichan wrote:
>> No, but the phishermen are getting better and better all the time. In 
>> some cases, I have to look at the message source, for email, to check 
>> what the real URLs are for the links. I see a lot from the .ru 
>> domains. I don’t really see how people can avoid these scams 
>> without a trove of knowledge that we used to consider ‘geeky’.
>
> -- 
> ☣ glen
>
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