Jason Hong's Confabulations

I've been collecting all phishing emails that have come into my inbox since 2010. I thought it would be fun to create some simple visualizations, to look for interesting patterns. Below is a wordle of 95 different Nigerian email scams. These are the scams where the sender of the email has a business proposition for you, with millions of dollars in a bank or secret fund, and they need your help getting it out. You can see several prominent words, like bank , money , contact , and fund . You can also see that these scammers are quite polite, with please being a common word too. Surprisingly, I only got 16 reply-to phishing emails. These are the ones where the scammer asks you to fill out your account information in the email, like your account name and password. Nothing too surprising here.   The largest set was 160 general phishing attacks, ones where the scammer tries to trick you into clicking a link or opening an attachment. You can see that these scammers are qui...

Marco Gruteser and I recently finished co-chairing the Mobisys 2015 technical program committee. Some of the TPC members said that it was the best run, least stressful program committee that they had been on, and were amazed that we were able to discuss over 60 papers. I thought it would be good to share what tools and processes we used to keep things running smoothly, to help other program committees. We allocated NNN minutes of discussion per paper (this will vary depending on PC size and #papers to discuss). Basically, take the total amount of time and divide by #papers to discuss, subtracting 1-2 minutes per paper as slack time. We used the iPad app Lightning Talk to keep track of time (thanks to Jenna Date for pointing me to this app) On the projector, we displayed what paper we were discussing and who the conflicts were. This helped speed up conflicts getting out of the room. Here is a shortened version of the slides . (Thanks to Morley Mao and Landon Cox for this id...

PrivacyGrade.org is our web site that presents our privacy analysis of a million Android smartphone apps. It's a deeper and broader analysis of apps beyond the previous blog posts on this site.

Our team has been analyzing Android apps for unusual behaviors, using crowdsourcing techniques to find differences between what people expect an app to do and what an app does in reality. Here are the top 10 most unexpected permissions, based on our crowdsourcing approach to analyze the behavior of Android apps. Each circle represents the level of surprise people had for each permission (N=20). For example, a vast majority of people (95%) were surprised that Brightest Flashlight used location data, but no one (0%) was surprised that Google Maps did so. Here, we can use level of surprise as one form of privacy. If people aren't surprised, then from our perspective it's less of a privacy issue, since people have some level of informed consent. On the other hand, if lots of people are surprised, then we have a potential privacy issue at hand. Click to zoom Here is the top 10 list in text form, with links to more analysis where available. Brightest Flashlight Toss I...

Brightest Flashlight Free GoldenShores Technologies, LLC Category: Tools Price: Free Description Brightest Flashlight Free - Turns on all available lights. Brightest Flashlight App – Free of Charge * Turns on all available lights on the device * Camera Flash LED at Maximum * Screen at Bright Maximum * Keyboard Backlight at Maximum * Soft Keys Backlight at Maximum Resource Used by Description Device ID Mdotm Millennial Media Mobclix Mobile ad optimization and tracking Targeted mobile advertising Mobile ads, analytics, ad exchange Location Adwhirl Flurry InMobi Mobclix Mobile ad network aggregator App analytics Targeted mobile advertising Mobile ads, analytics, ad exchange Other 3 rd -party libraries app uses Zestadz Mobile ad network Privacy Analysis Description ·  95% of people were surprised Bright...

Horoscope Horoscope.fr Category: Lifestyle Price: Free Description Check your complete horoscopes for today, tomorrow and much more ! Horoscope : The official Horoscope from horoscope.fr now available on your Android phone ! 100% FREE, 100% PRO ! Resource Used by Description Device ID Used for indexing users Location Flurry App analytics Other 3 rd -party libraries app uses Facebook Twitter Privacy Analysis Description ·  80% of people were surprised Horoscope uses your unique Device ID ·  80% of people were surprised Horoscope uses your location You can read more about our research on app privacy here.

Shazam Shazam Entertainment Limited Category: Music & Audio Price: Free Description Hear a song you don't know? Shazam identifies it instantly. Free and Unlimited. Faster tagging. Now discover, explore and share more music, TV shows and brands you love in as little as one second. Resource Used by Description Device ID Used for indexing users Location Admarvel Medialets Shazam Mobile ad optimization Mobile ads and campaigns Owner of app, for tagging songs Other 3 rd -party libraries app uses Facebook Google Ads Privacy Analysis Description ·  60% of people were surprised Shazam uses your unique Device ID ·  80% of people were surprised Shazam uses your location You can read more about our research on app privacy here.