We assess the risk of phishing on mobile platforms. Mobile operating systems and browsers lack secure application identity indicators, so the user cannot always identify whether a link has taken her to the expected application. We conduct a systematic analysis of ways in which mobile applications and web sites link to each other. To evaluate the risk, we study 85 web sites and 100 mobile applic...

In this usability study of phishing attacks and browser antiphishing defenses, 27 users each classified 12 web sites as fraudulent or legitimate. By dividing these users into three groups, our controlled study measured both the effect of extended validation certificates that appear only at legitimate sites and the effect of reading a help file about security features in Internet Explorer 7. Acr...

Website Forgery is a type of web based attack where the phisher builds a website that is completely independent or a replica of a legitimate website, with the goal of deceiving a user by extracting information that could be used to defraud or launch other attacks upon the victim. In this paper we attempt to identify the different types of website forgery phishing attacks and non-technical count...

Hands-on laboratory exercises are a very important component of computer security and information assurance education. This paper reports the laboratory exercises we designed to demonstrate two ways of conducting phishing attack: 1) Embedding a hyperlink in a fake email which redirects the victim to a fake website; 2) Using ARP cache poisoning to redirect web access to a fake website. The two w...

Phishing websites continue to successfully exploit user vulnerabilities in household and enterprise settings. Existing anti-phishing tools lack the accuracy and generalizability needed to protect Internet users and organizations from the myriad of attacks encountered daily. Consequently, users often disregard these tools’ warnings. In this study, using a design science approach, we propose a no...

A phishing attack is a criminal activity which mimics a certain legitimate webpage using a fake webpage with an intention of luring end-users to visit the fake website thereby stealing their personal information such as usernames, passwords and other personal details such as credit card information. Phishing has seen an alarming trend of increase in both the volume and the sophistication of phi...

Most users have multiple accounts on the Internet where each account is protected by a password. To avoid the headache in remembering and managing a long list of different and unrelated passwords, most users simply use the same password for multiple accounts. Unfortunately, the predominant HTTP basic authentication protocol (even over SSL) makes this common practice remarkably dangerous: an att...

Most secure web sites use the SSL/TLS protocol for server authentication. SSL/TLS supports mutual authentication, i.e. both server and client authentication. However, this optional feature of SSL/TLS is not used by most web sites because not every client has a certified public key. Instead user authentication is typically achieved by sending a password to the server after the establishment of a...