4,627 research outputs found
Cost-Sensitive Online Active Learning with application to malicious URL detection
Ministry of Education, Singapore under its Academic Research Funding Tier
An Evasion Attack against ML-based Phishing URL Detectors
Background: Over the year, Machine Learning Phishing URL classification
(MLPU) systems have gained tremendous popularity to detect phishing URLs
proactively. Despite this vogue, the security vulnerabilities of MLPUs remain
mostly unknown. Aim: To address this concern, we conduct a study to understand
the test time security vulnerabilities of the state-of-the-art MLPU systems,
aiming at providing guidelines for the future development of these systems.
Method: In this paper, we propose an evasion attack framework against MLPU
systems. To achieve this, we first develop an algorithm to generate adversarial
phishing URLs. We then reproduce 41 MLPU systems and record their baseline
performance. Finally, we simulate an evasion attack to evaluate these MLPU
systems against our generated adversarial URLs. Results: In comparison to
previous works, our attack is: (i) effective as it evades all the models with
an average success rate of 66% and 85% for famous (such as Netflix, Google) and
less popular phishing targets (e.g., Wish, JBHIFI, Officeworks) respectively;
(ii) realistic as it requires only 23ms to produce a new adversarial URL
variant that is available for registration with a median cost of only
$11.99/year. We also found that popular online services such as Google
SafeBrowsing and VirusTotal are unable to detect these URLs. (iii) We find that
Adversarial training (successful defence against evasion attack) does not
significantly improve the robustness of these systems as it decreases the
success rate of our attack by only 6% on average for all the models. (iv)
Further, we identify the security vulnerabilities of the considered MLPU
systems. Our findings lead to promising directions for future research.
Conclusion: Our study not only illustrate vulnerabilities in MLPU systems but
also highlights implications for future study towards assessing and improving
these systems.Comment: Draft for ACM TOP
Emerging Phishing Trends and Effectiveness of the Anti-Phishing Landing Page
Each month, more attacks are launched with the aim of making web users
believe that they are communicating with a trusted entity which compels them to
share their personal, financial information. Phishing costs Internet users
billions of dollars every year. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU)
created an anti-phishing landing page supported by Anti-Phishing Working Group
(APWG) with the aim to train users on how to prevent themselves from phishing
attacks. It is used by financial institutions, phish site take down vendors,
government organizations, and online merchants. When a potential victim clicks
on a phishing link that has been taken down, he / she is redirected to the
landing page. In this paper, we present the comparative analysis on two
datasets that we obtained from APWG's landing page log files; one, from
September 7, 2008 - November 11, 2009, and other from January 1, 2014 - April
30, 2014. We found that the landing page has been successful in training users
against phishing. Forty six percent users clicked lesser number of phishing
URLs from January 2014 to April 2014 which shows that training from the landing
page helped users not to fall for phishing attacks. Our analysis shows that
phishers have started to modify their techniques by creating more legitimate
looking URLs and buying large number of domains to increase their activity. We
observed that phishers are exploiting ICANN accredited registrars to launch
their attacks even after strict surveillance. We saw that phishers are trying
to exploit free subdomain registration services to carry out attacks. In this
paper, we also compared the phishing e-mails used by phishers to lure victims
in 2008 and 2014. We found that the phishing e-mails have changed considerably
over time. Phishers have adopted new techniques like sending promotional
e-mails and emotionally targeting users in clicking phishing URLs
Experimental Case Studies for Investigating E-Banking Phishing Techniques and Attack Strategies
Phishing is a form of electronic identity theft in which a combination of social engineering and web site spoofing techniques are used to trick a user into revealing confidential information with economic value. The problem of social engineering attack is that there is no single solution to eliminate it completely, since it deals largely with the human factor. This is why implementing empirical experiments is very crucial in order to study and to analyze all malicious and deceiving phishing website attack techniques and strategies. In this paper, three different kinds of phishing experiment case studies have been conducted to shed some light into social engineering attacks, such as phone phishing and phishing website attacks for designing effective countermeasures and analyzing the efficiency of performing security awareness about phishing threats. Results and reactions to our experiments show the importance of conducting phishing training awareness for all users and doubling our efforts in developing phishing prevention techniques. Results also suggest that traditional standard security phishing factor indicators are not always effective for detecting phishing websites, and alternative intelligent phishing detection approaches are needed
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