Phishing in email and instant messaging

Abstract. Phishing is a constantly evolving threat in the world of information security that affects everyone, no matter if you’re a retail worker or the head of IT in a large organisation. Because of this, this thesis aims to give the reader a good overview of what phishing is, and due to its prevalence in email and instant messaging, focuses on educating the reader on common signs and techniques used in phishing in the aforementioned forms of communication. The chosen research method is literature review, as it is the ideal choice for presenting an overview of a larger subject. As a result of the research, many common phishing signs and techniques in both email and instant messaging are presented. Some of these signs include strange senders, fake domain names and spellings mistakes. With this thesis, anyone looking to improve their understanding about phishing can do so in a way that is easy to understand. Some suggestions for future research are also presented based on this thesis’ shortcomings, namely the lack of studies on phishing in instant messaging

Consumer protection for online banking scams via e-mail in Malaysia

The new advancement in technology both hard and soft is creating new opportunities for cyber criminals.It is an effective tool for going against the law.In the economic sector, the number of Malaysians opting for online banking to do transaction is increasing.There are 9.8 million online banking account holders in Malaysia. However, cases of online banking scams in Malaysia have been increasing since such first case was registered in 2005.Statistics from Financial Mediation Bureau showed that the number of cases had increased.Therefore, the objectives of this paper are to identify cyber scams via email in online banking business model and to examine consumer protection of online banking scams in Malaysia

Large-Scale Analysis of Pop-Up Scam on Typosquatting URLs

Today, many different types of scams can be found on the internet. Online criminals are always finding new creative ways to trick internet users, be it in the form of lottery scams, downloading scam apps for smartphones or fake gambling websites. This paper presents a large-scale study on one particular delivery method of online scam: pop-up scam on typosquatting domains. Typosquatting describes the concept of registering domains which are very similar to existing ones while deliberately containing common typing errors; these domains are then used to trick online users while under the belief of browsing the intended website. Pop-up scam uses JavaScript alert boxes to present a message which attracts the user's attention very effectively, as they are a blocking user interface element. Our study among typosquatting domains derived from the Alexa Top 1 Million list revealed on 8255 distinct typosquatting URLs a total of 9857 pop-up messages, out of which 8828 were malicious. The vast majority of those distinct URLs (7176) were targeted and displayed pop-up messages to one specific HTTP user agent only. Based on our scans, we present an in-depth analysis as well as a detailed classification of different targeting parameters (user agent and language) which triggered varying kinds of pop-up scams.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figure