An eye for deception: A case study in utilizing the human-as-a-security-sensor paradigm to detect zero-day semantic social engineering attacks

In a number of information security scenarios, human beings can be better than technical security measures at detecting threats. This is particularly the case when a threat is based on deception of the user rather than exploitation of a specific technical flaw, as is the case of spear-phishing, application spoofing, multimedia masquerading and other semantic social engineering attacks. Here, we put the concept of the human-as-a-security-sensor to the test with a first case study on a small number of participants subjected to different attacks in a controlled laboratory environment and provided with a mechanism to report these attacks if they spot them. A key challenge is to estimate the reliability of each report, which we address with a machine learning approach. For comparison, we evaluate the ability of known technical security countermeasures in detecting the same threats. This initial proof of concept study shows that the concept is viable.