Phishing attacks have been on the rise and performing certain actions such as mouse hovering, clicking, etc. on malicious URLs may cause unsuspecting Internet users to fall victims of identity theft or other scams. In this paper, we study the anatomy of phishing URLs that are created with the specific intent of impersonating a trusted third party to trick users into divulging personal data. Unl...

Pharming is an advance phishing attack. It is also known as “phishing without a lure”. A hacker's attempt to change/exploit the DNS settings of a server so that when you enter the address of a legitimate website, it redirects you to a fake/copy of the original site hosted somewhere else. It is a classy edition of phishing attacks – endeavor to take users’ identification like username and passwo...

Phishing attacks remain a common attack vector in today’s IT threat landscape, and one of the primary means of preventing phishing attacks is e-mail filtering. Most e-mail filtering is done according to a either a signaturebased approach or using Bayesian models, so when specific signatures are detected the e-mail is either quarantined or moved to a Junk mailbox. Much like antivirus, though, a ...

A key way in which banks mitigate the effects of phishing is to have fraudulent websites removed or abusive domain names suspended. This ‘take-down’ is often subcontracted to specialist companies. We analyse six months of ‘feeds’ of phishing website URLs from multiple sources, including two such companies. We demonstrate that in each case huge numbers of websites may be known to others, but the...

The large-scale deployment of modern phishing attacks relies on the automatic exploitation of vulnerable websites in the wild, to maximize profit while hindering attack traceability, detection and blacklisting. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that specifically leverages this adversarial behavior for detection purposes. We show that phishing webpages can be accurately detect...

The email system is the central battleground against phishing and social engineering attacks, and yet email providers still face key challenges to authenticate incoming emails. As a result, attackers can apply spoofing techniques to impersonate a trusted entity to conduct highly deceptive phishing attacks. In this work, we study email spoofing to answer three key questions: (1) How do email pro...

With the exponential growth in web based applications, a typical user has to create a lot of usernames and passwords in order to use these services, while using these services user have to keep track of her credentials which in turns results in high probability of identity theft. A secure and reliable identity management system is required in this scenario. OpenID is a good solution to interact...

To reduce the damage of phishing and spyware attacks, banks, governments, and other security-sensitive industries are deploying one-time password systems, where users have many passwords and use each password only once. If a single password is compromised, it can be only be used to impersonate the user once, limiting the damage caused. However, existing practical approaches to one-time password...

Evolution in the world of internet has given rise to several online attacks and the most common attack is phishing. Victims are tricked into providing such information by a combination of spoofing techniques and social engineering. Phishing is an attempt by an individual or a group to acquire sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details from unsuspecting victims. ...