Phishing

About: Phishing is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 5064 publications have been published within this topic receiving 80213 citations. The topic is also known as: phishing attack.

Why phishing works

Abstract: To build systems shielding users from fraudulent (or phishing) websites, designers need to know which attack strategies work and why. This paper provides the first empirical evidence about which malicious strategies are successful at deceiving general users. We first analyzed a large set of captured phishing attacks and developed a set of hypotheses about why these strategies might work. We then assessed these hypotheses with a usability study in which 22 participants were shown 20 web sites and asked to determine which ones were fraudulent. We found that 23% of the participants did not look at browser-based cues such as the address bar, status bar and the security indicators, leading to incorrect choices 40% of the time. We also found that some visual deception attacks can fool even the most sophisticated users. These results illustrate that standard security indicators are not effective for a substantial fraction of users, and suggest that alternative approaches are needed.

Social phishing

Abstract: Sometimes a "friendly" email message tempts recipients to reveal more online than they otherwise would, playing right into the sender's hand.

Cantina: a content-based approach to detecting phishing web sites

Abstract: Phishing is a significant problem involving fraudulent email and web sites that trick unsuspecting users into revealing private information. In this paper, we present the design, implementation, and evaluation of CANTINA, a novel, content-based approach to detecting phishing web sites, based on the TF-IDF information retrieval algorithm. We also discuss the design and evaluation of several heuristics we developed to reduce false positives. Our experiments show that CANTINA is good at detecting phishing sites, correctly labeling approximately 95% of phishing sites.

The Economics of Information Security

Abstract: The economics of information security has recently become a thriving and fast-moving discipline. As distributed systems are assembled from machines belonging to principals with divergent interests, we find that incentives are becoming as important as technical design in achieving dependability. The new field provides valuable insights not just into "security" topics (such as bugs, spam, phishing, and law enforcement strategy) but into more general areas such as the design of peer-to-peer systems, the optimal balance of effort by programmers and testers, why privacy gets eroded, and the politics of digital rights management.

Learning to detect phishing emails

Abstract: Each month, more attacks are launched with the aim of making web users believe that they are communicating with a trusted entity for the purpose of stealing account information, logon credentials, and identity information in general. This attack method, commonly known as "phishing," is most commonly initiated by sending out emails with links to spoofed websites that harvest information. We present a method for detecting these attacks, which in its most general form is an application of machine learning on a feature set designed to highlight user-targeted deception in electronic communication. This method is applicable, with slight modification, to detection of phishing websites, or the emails used to direct victims to these sites. We evaluate this method on a set of approximately 860 such phishing emails, and 6950 non-phishing emails, and correctly identify over 96% of the phishing emails while only mis-classifying on the order of 0.1% of the legitimate emails. We conclude with thoughts on the future for such techniques to specifically identify deception, specifically with respect to the evolutionary nature of the attacks and information available.