Draining the Water Hole: Mitigating Social Engineering Attacks with CyberTWEAK

Authors

  • Zheyuan Ryan Shi Carnegie Mellon University
  • Aaron Schlenker Facebook, Inc.
  • Brian Hay Security Works
  • Daniel Bittleston Carnegie Mellon University
  • Siyu Gao Carnegie Mellon University
  • Emily Peterson Carnegie Mellon University
  • John Trezza Carnegie Mellon University
  • Fei Fang Carnegie Mellon University

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i08.7050

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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Published

2020-04-03

How to Cite

Shi, Z. R., Schlenker, A., Hay, B., Bittleston, D., Gao, S., Peterson, E., Trezza, J., & Fang, F. (2020). Draining the Water Hole: Mitigating Social Engineering Attacks with CyberTWEAK. Proceedings of the AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence, 34(08), 13363-13368. https://doi.org/10.1609/aaai.v34i08.7050

Issue

Section

IAAI Technical Track: Emerging Papers