Hunter Hunted - Mitigating Phishing Attacks

Abstract

The webscape is swarmed with increasing numbers of emails and websites that attempts to deceive users into providing identity information by purporting to emanate from trusted entities. These e-mails referred to as “phishing e-mails” masquerade trusted party emblems, logos and trademarks and contains phony weblinks that compromise users accounts with malware and keyloggers. Traditional spam filters are not efficient in adequately detecting these undesirable e-mails thus making consumers and businesses vulnerable online. The tendency in the cyber security domain is to perceive this problem as a simple text classification problem. However, classification is compounded by the fact that these classes of “phishing” emails are identical to the class of real e-mails. Using Netbeans IDE (which offers a wide range of functionalities from source code editor to program GUI's construction) we developed a plug-in for Mozilla Firefox browser to enhancing the browser's functionality. The plug-in called “PhisermanPro” is a toolbar extension that monitors the address bar” of browsers to ensure that users do not navigate to “phishing” sites. Preliminary tests and application in an academic context to identify fake conference and workshop sites showed very promising results.

Keywords: Phishing, security, malware, PhishermanPro, webscape.