“Do Users fall for Real Adversarial Phishing?” Investigating the Human Response to Evasive Webpages
Conference APWG Symposium on Electronic Crime Research
Barcelona, Spain
Oneliner: A breath of fresh air... from the real world.
This event was a blast. Aside from being my first time in Barcelona (lovely city!), I will always remember this conference for having a substantially different “vibe” with respect to the many other (academic) conferences that I attended before. Specifically, at eCrime, I could feel that the attendees/speakers were there “to solve problems”, whereas in the other venues, I felt that the intention was more that of “talking about research”. While there is nothing wrong in talking about research, most of such discussion can lead to making assumptions that are not aligned with the real world.
Being an engineer, I do appreciate having a firm vision on the pragmatic value of my research—albeit (of course) I cannot claim that this holds for all my papers. Yet, I felt that in this paper (for which my most heartfelt thanks go to the first author, Ajka Draganovic, a student at UniLie whom I had the pleasure to supervise for her MSc. thesis) we somehow managed to align scientific research with industrial practice as well as with the impact of existing technologies (offensive and defensive) on real people. This, in fact, was the aspect that I mostly stressed during this talk.
Finally, being nominated as “Runner-up” for the Best Paper Award was a pleasant achievement: however, yet again, most of the gratitude goes to Ajka.