PHISHING
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This phishing attempt, disguised as an official email from a (fictional) bank, attempts to trick the bank's members into giving away their account information by "confirming" it at the ''phisher's linked website.
A Geocities web page duplicating the Yahoo! login page.
In computing, 'phishing' is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques.[1] Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication. eBay and PayPal are two of the most targeted companies, and online banks are also common targets. Phishing is typically carried out by email or instant messaging,[2]
and often directs users to give details at a website, although phone contact has been used as well.[3] Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures.
The first recorded mention of the term phishing is on the alt.online-service.america-online Usenet newsgroup on January 2, 1996,[4]
although the term may have appeared even earlier in the print edition of the hacker magazine ''.[5]A phishing technique was described in detail as early as 1987, in a paper and presentation delivered to the International HP Users Group, Interex.[6]
The term ''phishing'' is a variant of ''fishing'',[7] probably influenced by phreaking,[8][9]
and alludes to the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to "fish" for a user's financial information and passwords. The word may also be linked to leetspeak, in which ''ph'' is a common substitution for ''f''.[10]
The popular theory that it is a portmanteau of ''password harvesting''[11] is an example of folk etymology.
History and current status of phishing
Early phishing on AOL
Those who would later phish on AOL during the 1990s originally used fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to create accounts on AOL, which could last weeks or even months. After AOL brought in measures in late 1995 to prevent this, early AOL crackers resorted to phishing for legitimate accounts.[12]
Phishing on AOL was closely associated with the warez community that exchanged pirated software. A phisher might pose as an AOL staff member and send an instant message to a potential victim, asking him to reveal his password.[13] In order to lure the victim into giving up sensitive information the message might include text such as "verify your account" or "confirm billing information". Once the victim had submitted his password, the attacker could access and use the victim's account for criminal purposes, such as spamming. Both phishing and warezing on AOL generally required custom-written programs, such as AOHell. Phishing became so prevalent on AOL that they added a line on all instant messages stating: "no one working at AOL will ask for your password or billing information".
After 1997, AOL's policy enforcement with respect to phishing and warez became stricter and forced pirated software off AOL servers. AOL simultaneously developed a system to promptly deactivate accounts involved in phishing, often before the victims could respond. The shutting down of the warez scene on AOL caused most phishers to leave the service, and many phishers — often young teens — grew out of the habit.[14]'
Transition from AOL to financial institutions
Capture of AOL account information may have led phishers to misuse credit card information, which then evolved into attacks against online payment systems. The first known direct attempt against a payment system affected E-gold in June 2001, which was followed up by a "post-911 id check" shortly after the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center.[15] Both were viewed at the time as failures, but can now be seen as early experiments towards more fruitful attacks against mainstream banks. By 2004, phishing was recognized as fully industrialized, in the sense of an economy of crime: specializations emerged on a global scale and provided components for cash which were assembled into a finished attack.[16][17]
Recent phishing attempts
A chart showing the increase in phishing reports from October 2004 to June 2005.
More recent phishing attempts have targeted the customers of banks and online payment services. E-mails supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service have also been used to glean sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers.[18] While the first such examples were sent indiscriminately in the hope of finding a customer of a given bank or service, recent research has shown that phishers may in principle be able to establish what bank a potential victim has a relationship with, and then send an appropriate spoofed email to this victim.[19] Targeted versions of phishing have been termed ''spear phishing''.[20] Social networking sites are also a target of phishing, since the personal details in such sites can be used in identity theft[21]; in late 2006 a computer worm took over pages on MySpace and altered links to direct surfers to websites designed to steal login details.[22] Experiments show a success rate of over 70% for phishing attacks on social networks.[23]
Phishing techniques
Link manipulation
Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an email (and the spoofed website it leads to) appear to belong to the spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common tricks used by phishers, such as this example URL,
An old method of spoofing used links containing the
A further problem with URLs has been found in the handling of Internationalized domain names (IDN) in web browsers, that might allow visually identical web addresses to lead to different, possibly malicious, websites. Despite the publicity surrounding the flaw, known as IDN spoofing[27] or a homograph attack,[28] no known phishing attacks have yet taken advantage of it. Phishers have taken advantage of a similar risk, using open URL redirectors on the websites of trusted organizations to disguise malicious URLs with a trusted domain.[29][30]
Website forgery
Once the victim visits the website the deception is not over.[31] Some phishing scams use JavaScript commands in order to alter the address bar. This is done either by placing a picture of a legitimate URL over the address bar, or by closing the original address bar and opening a new one with the legitimate URL.[32]
An attacker can even use flaws in a trusted website's own scripts against the victim.[33] These types of attacks (known as cross-site scripting) are particularly problematic, because they direct the user to sign in at their bank or service's own web page, where everything from the web address to the security certificates appears correct. In reality, the link to the website is crafted to carry out the attack, although it is very difficult to spot without specialist knowledge. Just such a flaw was used in 2006 against PayPal.[34]
A Universal Man-in-the-middle Phishing Kit, discovered by RSA Security, provides a simple-to-use interface that allows a phisher to convincingly reproduce websites and capture log-in details entered at the fake site.[35]
Phone phishing
Not all phishing attacks require a fake website. Messages that claimed to be from a bank told users to dial a phone number regarding problems with their bank accounts.[36] Once the phone number (owned by the phisher, and provided by a Voice over IP service) was dialed, prompts told users to enter their account numbers and PIN. Voice phishing sometimes uses fake caller-ID data to give the appearance that calls come from a trusted organization.[37]
Phishing examples
PayPal phishing example
An example of a phishing email targeted at PayPal users.
In an example PayPal phish (right), spelling mistakes in the email and the presence of an IP address in the link (visible in the tooltip under the yellow box) are both clues that this is a phishing attempt. Another giveaway is the lack of a personal greeting, although the presence of personal details is not a guarantee of legitimacy.
SouthTrust Bank example
In this second example, targeted at SouthTrust Bank users, the phisher used an image to make it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect text commonly used in phishing emails.[38]
:
'
:'From:' SouthTrust
:'To:' john.smith@example.com
:'Subject:' SouthTrust Bank: Important Notification
:'Date:' Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:56:30 -0200 (22:56 BRT)
Damage caused by phishing
The damage caused by phishing ranges from loss of access to email to substantial financial loss. This style of identity theft is becoming more popular, because of the ease with which unsuspecting people often divulge personal information to phishers, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, and mothers' maiden names. There are also fears that identity thieves can add such information to the knowledge they gain simply by accessing public records.[39] Once this information is acquired, the phishers may use a person's details to create fake accounts in a victim's name, ruin a victim's credit, or even prevent victims from accessing their own accounts.[40]
It is estimated that between May 2004 and May 2005, approximately 1.2 million computer users in the United States suffered losses caused by phishing, totaling approximately US$929 million. U.S. businesses lose an estimated US$2 billion per year as their clients become victims.[41] In the United Kingdom losses from web banking fraud — mostly from phishing — almost doubled to £23.2m in 2005, from £12.2m in 2004,[42] while 1 in 20 users claimed to have lost out to phishing in 2005.[43]
The UK banking body APACS' stance is that "customers must also take sensible precautions...so that they are not vulnerable to the criminal."[44] Similarly, when the first spate of phishing attacks hit the Irish Republic's banking sector in September 2006, the Bank of Ireland initially refused to (and still insists that its policy is not to[45]) cover losses suffered by its customers, although losses to the tune of €11300 were made good.[46]
Anti-phishing
There are several different techniques to combat phishing, including legislation and technology created specifically to protect against phishing.
Social responses
One strategy for combating phishing is to train users to deal with phishing attempts. User education can be promising, especially where training provides direct feedback to the user on his success (or otherwise).[47] One newer phishing tactic, which uses phishing emails targeted at a specific company, known as ''spear phishing'', has been harnessed to train users at various locations, including West Point Military Academy. In a June 2004 experiment with spear phishing, 80% of 500 West Point cadets who were sent a fake email were tricked into revealing personal information.[48]
Users can take steps to avoid phishing attempts by slightly modifying their browsing habits. Users who are contacted about an account needing to be "verified" (or any other topic used by phishers) can contact the company that is the subject of the email to check that the email is legitimate, or can type in a trusted web address for the company's website into the address bar of their browser to bypass the link in the suspected phishing message.[49]
Nearly all legitimate email messages from companies to their customers will contain an item of information that is not readily available to phishers. Some companies, like PayPal, always address their customers by their username in emails, so if an email addresses a user in a generic fashion ("''Dear PayPal customer''") it is likely to be an attempt at phishing.[50] Emails from banks and credit card companies will often include partial account numbers.
However, recent research [51] has shown that typical users do not distinguish between the first few digits and the last few digits of an account number. This is a significant problem since the first few digits often are the same for all clients of one financial institution.
One should always be suspicious if the message does not contain specific personal information. Phishing attempts in early 2006, however, used such highly personalized information, making it unsafe to rely on personal information alone as a sign that a message is legitimate.[52] Furthermore, another recent study concluded in part that the presence of this information does not significantly affect the success rate of phishing attacks,[53] suggesting that most users do not pay attention to such details anyway.
The Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry and law enforcement association, has suggested that conventional phishing techniques could become obsolete in the future as people are increasingly aware of the social engineering techniques used by phishers.[54] They propose that pharming and other uses of malware will become more common tools for stealing information.
Technical responses
Anti-phishing measures have been implemented
as features embedded in browsers,
as extensions or toolbars for browsers,
and as part of website login procedures.
The following are some of the main approaches to the problem.
Helping users identify legitimate sites
Since phishing is based on impersonation,
preventing it depends on users having some reliable way
to identify the sites they are dealing with.
For example, some anti-phishing toolbars
display the real domain name for the visited website.[55] The petname extension for Firefox lets users type in
their own labels for websites,
so they can later recognize when they are back at the correct site.
If the site is a suspect, then the software may either warn the user or block the site outright.
Alerting users to fraudulent websites
Another popular approach to fighting phishing
is to maintain a list of known phishing sites
and to check websites against the list.
Microsoft's IE7 browser,
Mozilla Firefox 2.0, and Opera
all contain this type of anti-phishing measure.[56][57][58] Firefox 2 uses Google anti-phishing software.
Opera 9.1 uses live blacklists from
PhishTank and GeoTrust,
as well as live whitelists from GeoTrust.
Some implementations of this approach
send the visited URLs to a central service to be checked,
which has raised concerns about compromising the user's privacy.[59] According to a report by Mozilla in late 2006, Firefox 2 was found to be more effective than Internet Explorer 7 at detecting fraudulent sites in a study by an independent software testing company
[60].
An approach introduced in mid-2006 involves switching to a special DNS service that filters out known phishing domains, which will work with any browser.[61] This is similar in principle to using a hosts file to block web adverts.
To mitigate the problem of phishing sites spoofing a victim site and embedding its images (such as logos) in a spoof site, several site owners have responded by altering the images to send a message to the visitor. If the images were not requested in the normal way by visiting the real page then a warning that the site is fraudulent can be substituted for the usual image, or the original image can be moved to a new filename and the original permanently replaced with a warning.[62][63]
Augmenting password logins
Bank of America[64][65] is one of several websites
that ask users to select a personal image,
and display this user-selected image
with any forms that request a password.
Users are instructed to only enter a password
when they see the image they selected;
if the correct image does not appear,
they are expected to recognize that the site is not legitimate.
However, a recent study suggests few users refrain
from entering their password when images are
absent.[66][67] This feature (like other forms of two-factor authentication) is also susceptible to other attacks, such as those suffered by Scandinavian bank Nordea in late 2005,[68] and Citibank in 2006.[69]
Security skins[70][71] are a related technique
that involves overlaying a user-selected image
across the login form as a visual cue that the form is legitimate.
However, unlike the website-based image schemes,
this image is shared between the user and the browser,
not between the user and the website. The scheme also relies on a mutual authentication protocol, which makes it less vulnerable to attacks that affect user-only authentication schemes.
Eliminating phishing mail
Spam filters can also help by reducing the number of phishing emails that users receive in their inboxes.[72]
[73]
Monitoring and takedown
Several companies offer banks and other entities likely to suffer from phishing scams 24/7 services to monitor, analyze and assist in shutting down phishing websites.[74] Individuals can contribute by reporting phishing to both volunteer and industry groups,[75] such as PhishTank.[76]
Legal responses
On January 26, 2004, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission filed the first lawsuit against a suspected phisher. The defendant, a Californian teenager, allegedly created and used a webpage designed to look like the America Online website, so that he could steal credit card information.[77] Other countries have followed the lead of the U.S. by tracing and arresting phishers. A phishing kingpin, Valdir Paulo de Almeida, was arrested in Brazil for leading one of the largest phishing crime rings, which in 2 years stole between $18 and $37 million USD.[78] UK authorities jailed two men in June 2005 for their role in a phishing scam,[79] in a case connected to the U.S. Secret Service Operation Firewall, which targeted notorious "carder" websites.[80] In 2006 eight people were arrested by Japanese police on suspicion of phishing fraud by creating bogus Yahoo Japan Web sites, netting themselves 100 million yen ($870 thousand USD).[81] The arrests continued in 2006 with the FBI Operation Cardkeeper detaining a gang of sixteen in the U.S. and Europe.[82]
In the United States, Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the ''Anti-Phishing Act of 2005'' on March 1, 2005. The federal anti-phishing bill proposes that criminals who create fake web sites and spam bogus emails in order to defraud consumers could receive a fine up to $250,000 and receive jail terms of up to five years.[83]
The UK strengthened the legal arsenal against phishing with the Fraud Act 2006,[84] which introduces a general offence of fraud that can carry up to a ten year sentence, and prohibits writing or possessing phishing kits with intent to commit fraud.[85]
Companies have also joined the effort to crack down on phishing. On March 31, 2005, Microsoft filed 117 federal lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The lawsuits accuse "John Doe" defendants of using various methods to obtain passwords and confidential information. March 2005 also saw Microsoft partner with the Australian government to teach law enforcement officials how to combat various cyber crimes, including phishing.[86] Microsoft announced a planned further 100 lawsuits outside the U.S. in March 2006,[87] followed by the commencement, as of November 2006, of 129 lawsuits mixing criminal and civil actions.[88]
AOL reinforced its efforts against phishing[89] in early 2006 with three lawsuits[90] seeking a total of $18 million USD under the 2005 amendments to the Virginia Computer Crimes Act,[91][92] and Earthlink has joined in by helping to identify six men subsequently charged with phishing fraud in Connecticut.[93]
In January 2007, Jeffrey Brett Goodin of California became the first defendant convicted by a jury under the provisions of the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003. He was found guilty of sending thousands of e-mails to America Online users, while posing as AOL's billing department, which prompted customers to send personal and credit card information. Facing a possible 101 years in prison for the CAN-SPAM violation and ten other counts including wire fraud, unauthorized use of credit cards, and misusing AOL's trademark, he was sentenced to serve 70 months. Goodin had been in custody since failing to appear for an earlier court hearing and began serving his prison term immediately.[94][95][96][97]
See also
★ Anti-phishing software
★ Computer insecurity
★ Defensive computing
★ E-mail spoofing
★ Pharming
★ Rock Phish Kit
★ Social engineering
★ Vishing
References
1. What is social engineering? Microsoft Corporation
2. Phishing and Spamming via IM (SPIM) Tan, Koon
3. Phone phishing: The role of VoIP in phishing attacks Ed Skoudis
4. "phish, v." OED Online, March 2006, Oxford University Press.
5. The Phishing Guide: Understanding and Preventing Phishing Attacks Ollmann, Gunter
6. System Security: A Hacker's Perspective, Felix, Jerry and Hauck, Chris, , , 1987 Interex Proceedings, September 1987
7. Spam Slayer: Do You Speak Spam?
8. "phishing, n." OED Online, March 2006, Oxford University Press.
9. Phishing
10. A Leet Primer Anthony Mitchell
11. Know your Enemy: Phishing
12. Phishing
13. AOL: A Cracker's Paradise? Michael Stutz
14. History of AOL Warez
15. GP4.3 - Growth and Fraud - Case #3 - Phishing
16. In 2005, Organized Crime Will Back Phishers
17. The economy of phishing: A survey of the operations of the phishing market
18. Suspicious e-Mails and Identity Theft
19. Phishing for Clues
20. What is spear phishing?
21. Phishing Scam Takes Aim at MySpace.com Jeremy Kirk
22. Malicious Website / Malicious Code: MySpace XSS QuickTime Worm
23. Social Phishing Tom Jagatic and Nathan Johnson and Markus Jakobsson and Filippo Menczer
24. Uniform Resource Locators (URL) Berners-Lee, Tim
25. A security update is available that modifies the default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in HTTP and in HTTPS URLs Microsoft
26. Warn when HTTP URL auth information isn't necessary or when it's provided Fisher, Darin
27. The State of Homograph Attacks Rev1.1 Johanson, Eric
28. The Homograph Attack, Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Alex Gontmakher, , , Communications of the ACM, February 2002
29. Barclays scripting SNAFU exploited by phishers John Leyden
30. Goin' phishing with eBay Levine, Jason
31. Phishing Web Site Methods Mutton, Paul
32. Phishing con hijacks browser bar
33. Flaws in Financial Sites Aid Scammers Krebs, Brian
34. PayPal Security Flaw allows Identity Theft Mutton, Paul
35. RSA Catches Financial Phishing Kit Patrick Hoffman
36. Phishers Snare Victims With VoIP Antone Gonsalves
37. Identity thieves take advantage of VoIP
38. Fraudsters seek to make phishing sites undetectable by content filters Mutton, Paul
39. Messin' with Texas, Deriving Mother's Maiden Names Using Public Records Virgil Griffith and Markus Jakobsson
40. Phishing Schemes Scar Victims Brian Krebs
41. How Can We Stop Phishing and Pharming Scams? Paul Kerstein
42. UK phishing fraud losses double
43. Brits fall prey to phishing Tim Richardson
44. Bank, Customers Spar Over Phishing Losses Miller, Rich
45. http://applications.boi.com/updates/Article?PR_ID=1430
46. http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2163714/bank-ireland-backtracks
47. Protecting People from Phishing: The Design and Evaluation of an Embedded Training Email System. Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Yong Woo Rhee, Alessandro Acquisti, Lorrie Cranor, Jason Hong and Elizabeth Nunge.
48. 'Spear Phishing' Tests Educate People About Online Scams David Bank
49. Anti-Phishing Tips You Should Not Follow
50. Protect Yourself from Fraudulent Emails
51. What Instills Trust? A Qualitative Study of Phishing. Markus Jakobsson, Alex Tsow, Ankur Shah, Eli Blevis, Youn-kyung Lim.
52. Phishing Messages May Include Highly-Personalized Information Lenny Zeltser
53. Designing Ethical Phishing Experiments Markus Jakobsson and Jacob Ratkiewicz
54. Faced with a rise in so-called pharming and crimeware attacks, the Anti-Phishing Working Group will expand its charter to include these emerging threats. Dawn Kawamoto
55. Privacy Watch: Protect Yourself With an Antiphishing Toolbar Brandt, Andrew
56. Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers Franco, Rob
57. Bon Echo Anti-Phishing
58. Gone Phishing: Evaluating Anti-Phishing Tools for Windows
59. Two Things That Bother Me About Google’s New Firefox Extension
60. Firefox 2 Phishing Protection Effectiveness Testing
61.
DNS Gets Anti-Phishing Hook Higgins, Kelly Jackson
62. Using Images to Fight Phishing Brian Krebs
63. Spotting Phish and Phighting Back Larry Seltzer
64. How Bank of America SiteKey Works For Online Banking Security Bank of America
65. Bank of America Personalizes Cyber-Security Bill Brubaker
66.
Study Finds Web Antifraud Measure Ineffective
67.
The Emperor's New Security Indicators: An evaluation of website authentication and the effect of role playing on usability studies Stuart Schechter, Rachna Dhamija, Andy Ozment, Ian Fischer
68. Phishers target Nordea's one-time password system
69. Citibank Phish Spoofs 2-Factor Authentication Brian Krebs
70.
Security Skins Schneier, Bruce
71.
The Battle Against Phishing: Dynamic Security Skins Rachna Dhamija, J.D. Tygar
72. Phishing Email Detection Based on Structural Properties Madhusudhanan Chandrasekaran, Krishnan Narayanan, Shambhu Upadhyaya
73. Learning to Detect Phishing Emails Ian Fette, Norman Sadeh, Anthony Tomasic
74. Anti-Phishing Working Group: Vendor Solutions
75. New sites let users find and report phishing Robert McMillan
76. PhishTank - A New Collaborative Phishing Workgroup
77. 'Phishing' scams reel in your identity Jeordan Legon
78. Brazilian cops net 'phishing kingpin' John Leyden
79. UK Phishers Caught, Packed Away Paul Roberts
80. Nineteen Individuals Indicted in Internet 'Carding' Conspiracy
81. 8 held over suspected phishing fraud
82. Phishing gang arrested in USA and Eastern Europe after FBI investigation
83. Phishers Would Face 5 Years Under New Bill
84. Fraud Act 2006
85. Prison terms for phishing fraudsters
86. Microsoft Partners with Australian Law Enforcement Agencies to Combat Cyber Crime
87. Microsoft launches legal assault on phishers Tom Espiner
88. MS reels in a few stray phish John Leyden
89. A History of Leadership - 2006
90. AOL Takes Fight Against Identity Theft To Court, Files Lawsuits Against Three Major Phishing Gangs
91. HB 2471 Computer Crimes Act; changes in provisions, penalty.
92. Va. Lawmakers Aim to Hook Cyberscammers Karin Brulliard
93. Earthlink evidence helps slam the door on phisher site spam ring
94. Man Found Guilty of Targeting AOL Customers in Phishing Scam Brian Prince
95. AOL phishing fraudster found guilty John Leyden
96. AOL phisher nets six years' imprisonment John Leyden
97. California Man Gets 6-Year Sentence For Phishing Sharon Gaudin
External links
★ Anti-Phishing Working Group
★ Bank Safe Online - Advice to UK consumers
★ SecurityFocus - forensic examination of a phishing attack.
★ Center for Identity Management and Information Protection – Utica College
★ Plugging the "phishing" hole: legislation versus technology – ''Duke Law & Technology Review''
★ E-scams and Warnings Update - Federal Bureau of Investigation
★ How the bad guys actually operate – Ha.ckers.org Application Security Lab
★ Phishing Group at Indiana University
★ Know Your Enemy: Phishing - Honeynet project case study
★ The Phishing Guide: Understanding and Preventing Phishing Attacks – TechnicalInfo.net
★ Phishing mailing list signup page
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