Five people are listening…
This was the alarming message that Jennifer Grossman found on her computer screen one early morning about a year ago. The retired Arizona State University faculty member dialed the technical support phone number she found on the convincing-looking dialog box.
As Jennifer made the call, her husband Gary Grossman, an emeritus professor in the ASU School for the Future of Innovation in Society, awoke and listened in. The voice on the line claimed to be a specialist from Microsoft who told the couple that their computer had been hacked. They reacted in shock as the speaker read their credit card and bank account numbers aloud.
“It was very scary,” Jennifer Grossman says. “The person I spoke with used a lot of psychological techniques to keep me on the phone.”
The couple initially followed the instructions which included changing their usernames and passwords, but they balked when they were asked to transfer money from one of their bank accounts. On the advice of a bank teller, the Grossmans ended the interaction.
Known as a “tech support scam,” what happened to the Grossmans is part of a continuing rise in cybercrime. A recent report says that victims lost more than $1 trillion globally to scammers in 2024.
“This cybercrime technology is developing more quickly than our efforts to effectively respond,” Gary Grossman says.
But researchers in the School of Computing and Augmented Intelligence, part of the Ira A. Fulton Schools of Engineering at ASU, are hoping to change that.
Ananta Soneji is a cybersecurity doctoral student in the Fulton Schools. Working under the supervision of Adam Doupé, an associate professor of computer science and engineering, she specializes in human factors security research and is part of a team of students and faculty members working hard to design new technology that protects users from computer scams and cyberattacks.
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