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.

The state of phishing attacks

Abstract: Looking past the systems people use, they target the people using the systems.

The Emperor's New Security Indicators

Abstract: We evaluate Website authentication measures that are designed to protect users from man-in-the-middle, 'phishing', and other site forgery attacks. We asked 67 bank customers to conduct common online banking tasks. Each time they logged in, we presented increasingly alarming clues that their connection was insecure. First, we removed HTTPS indicators. Next, we removed the participant's site-authentication image--the customer-selected image that many Websites now expect their users to verify before entering their passwords. Finally, we replaced the bank's password-entry page with a warning page. After each clue, we determined whether participants entered their passwords or withheld them. We also investigate how a study's design affects participant behavior: we asked some participants to play a role and others to use their own accounts and passwords. We also presented some participants with security-focused instructions. We confirm prior findings that users ignore HTTPS indicators: no participants withheld their passwords when these indicators were removed. We present the first empirical investigation of site-authentication images, and we find them to be ineffective: even when we removed them, 23 of the 25 (92%) participants who used their own accounts entered their passwords. We also contribute the first empirical evidence that role playing affects participants' security behavior: role-playing participants behaved significantly less securely than those using their own passwords.

Detecting and characterizing social spam campaigns

Abstract: Online social networks (OSNs) are popular collaboration and communication tools for millions of users and their friends. Unfortunately, in the wrong hands, they are also effective tools for executing spam campaigns and spreading malware. Intuitively, a user is more likely to respond to a message from a Facebook friend than from a stranger, thus making social spam a more effective distribution mechanism than traditional email. In fact, existing evidence shows malicious entities are already attempting to compromise OSN account credentials to support these "high-return" spam campaigns. In this paper, we present an initial study to quantify and characterize spam campaigns launched using accounts on online social networks. We study a large anonymized dataset of asynchronous "wall" messages between Facebook users. We analyze all wall messages received by roughly 3.5 million Facebook users (more than 187 million messages in all), and use a set of automated techniques to detect and characterize coordinated spam campaigns. Our system detected roughly 200,000 malicious wall posts with embed- ded URLs, originating from more than 57,000 user accounts. We find that more than 70% of all malicious wall posts advertise phishing sites. We also study the characteristics of malicious accounts, and see that more than 97% are compromised accounts, rather than "fake" accounts created solely for the purpose of spamming. Finally, we observe that, when adjusted to the local time of the sender, spamming dominates actual wall post activity in the early morning hours, when normal users are asleep.

An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Internet Miscreants

Abstract: This paper studies an active underground economy which specializes in the commoditization of activities such as credit car d fraud, identity theft, spamming, phishing, online credential the ft, and the sale of compromised hosts. Using a seven month trace of logs collected from an active underground market operating on public Internet chat networks, we measure how the shift from “hacking for fun” to “hacking for profit” has given birth to a societal subs trate mature enough to steal wealth into the millions of dollars in less than one year.

Phishing Detection: A Literature Survey

Abstract: This article surveys the literature on the detection of phishing attacks. Phishing attacks target vulnerabilities that exist in systems due to the human factor. Many cyber attacks are spread via mechanisms that exploit weaknesses found in end-users, which makes users the weakest element in the security chain. The phishing problem is broad and no single silver-bullet solution exists to mitigate all the vulnerabilities effectively, thus multiple techniques are often implemented to mitigate specific attacks. This paper aims at surveying many of the recently proposed phishing mitigation techniques. A high-level overview of various categories of phishing mitigation techniques is also presented, such as: detection, offensive defense, correction, and prevention, which we belief is critical to present where the phishing detection techniques fit in the overall mitigation process.