Tracking Phishing Attacks Over Time

The so-called “phishing” attacks are one of the important threats to individuals and corporations in today’s Internet. Combatting phishing is thus a top-priority, and has been the focus of much work, both on the academic and on the industry sides. In this paper, we look at this problem from a new angle. We have monitored a total of 19,066 phishing attacks over a period of ten months and found that over 90% of these attacks were actually replicas or variations of other attacks in the database. This provides several opportunities and insights for the fight against phishing: first, quickly and efficiently detecting replicas is a very effective prevention tool. We detail one such tool in this paper. Second, the widely held belief that phishing attacks are dealt with promptly is but an illusion. We have recorded numerous attacks that stay active throughout our observation period. This shows that the current prevention techniques are ineffective and need to be overhauled. We provide some suggestions in this direction. Third, our observation give a new perspective into the modus operandi of attackers. In particular, some of our observations suggest that a small group of attackers could be behind a large part of the current attacks. Taking down that group could potentially have a large impact on the phishing attacks observed today.