Extended Abstract: Image Matching for Branding Phishing Kit Images

Phishing websites attempt to convince people to deliver their passwords, user IDs and other sensitive information by imitating legitimate websites such as banks, product vendors, or service providers. Using a phishing kit (compressed file) is a preferred way of creating phishing websites as it allows fast deployment of a phishing site. A kit may contain one or more images that are similar to the targeted brand such as a bank logo or a product trademark. In this paper, we explore the feasibility of using automatic image matching techniques to identify a kit’s targeted brand. To this end, we evaluate the ability of image matching algorithms to correctly identify a pool of images from suspected kits. Four image-matching algorithms are evaluated based on their accuracy of branding images extracted from sus-