Analyzing Social and Stylometric Features to Identify Spear phishing Emails

Spear phishing is a complex targeted attack in which, an attacker harvests information about the victim prior to the attack. This information is then used to create sophisticated, genuine-looking attack vectors, drawing the victim to compromise confidential information. What makes spear phishing different, and more powerful than normal phishing, is this contextual information about the victim. Online social media services can be one such source for gathering vital information about an individual. In this paper, we characterize and examine a true positive dataset of spear phishing, spam, and normal phishing emails from Symantec's enterprise email scanning service. We then present a model to detect spear phishing emails sent to employees of 14 international organizations, by using social features extracted from LinkedIn. Our dataset consists of 4,742 targeted attack emails sent to 2,434 victims, and 9,353 non targeted attack emails sent to 5,912 non victims; and publicly available information from their LinkedIn profiles. We applied various machine learning algorithms to this labeled data, and achieved an overall maximum accuracy of 97.76% in identifying spear phishing emails. We used a combination of social features from LinkedIn profiles, and stylometric features extracted from email subjects, bodies, and attachments. However, we achieved a slightly better accuracy of 98.28% without the social features. Our analysis revealed that social features extracted from LinkedIn do not help in identifying spear phishing emails. To the best of our knowledge, this is one of the first attempts to make use of a combination of stylometric features extracted from emails, and social features extracted from an online social network to detect targeted spear phishing emails.Comment: Detection of spear phishing using social media feature

Artificial intelligence in the cyber domain: Offense and defense

Artificial intelligence techniques have grown rapidly in recent years, and their applications in practice can be seen in many fields, ranging from facial recognition to image analysis. In the cybersecurity domain, AI-based techniques can provide better cyber defense tools and help adversaries improve methods of attack. However, malicious actors are aware of the new prospects too and will probably attempt to use them for nefarious purposes. This survey paper aims at providing an overview of how artificial intelligence can be used in the context of cybersecurity in both offense and defense.Web of Science123art. no. 41

Automatic generation of meta classifiers with large levels for distributed computing and networking

This paper is devoted to a case study of a new construction of classifiers. These classifiers are called automatically generated multi-level meta classifiers, AGMLMC. The construction combines diverse meta classifiers in a new way to create a unified system. This original construction can be generated automatically producing classifiers with large levels. Different meta classifiers are incorporated as low-level integral parts of another meta classifier at the top level. It is intended for the distributed computing and networking. The AGMLMC classifiers are unified classifiers with many parts that can operate in parallel. This make it easy to adopt them in distributed applications. This paper introduces new construction of classifiers and undertakes an experimental study of their performance. We look at a case study of their effectiveness in the special case of the detection and filtering of phishing emails. This is a possible important application area for such large and distributed classification systems. Our experiments investigate the effectiveness of combining diverse meta classifiers into one AGMLMC classifier in the case study of detection and filtering of phishing emails. The results show that new classifiers with large levels achieved better performance compared to the base classifiers and simple meta classifiers classifiers. This demonstrates that the new technique can be applied to increase the performance if diverse meta classifiers are included in the system

Image Spam Analysis

Image spam is unsolicited bulk email, where the message is embedded in an image. This technique is used to evade text-based spam lters. In this research, we analyze and compare two novel approaches for detecting spam images. Our rst approach focuses on the extraction of a broad set of image features and selection of an optimal subset using a Support Vector Machine (SVM). Our second approach is based on Principal Component Analysis (PCA), where we determine eigenvectors for a set of spam images and compute scores by projecting images onto the resulting eigenspace. Both approaches provide high accuracy with low computational complexity. Further, we develop a new spam image dataset that should prove valuable for improving image spam detection capabilities

SMS Spam Filtering: Methods and Data

Mobile or SMS spam is a real and growing problem primarily due to the availability of very cheap bulk pre-pay SMS packages and the fact that SMS engenders higher response rates as it is a trusted and personal service. SMS spam filtering is a relatively new task which inherits many issues and solu- tions from email spam filtering. However it poses its own specific challenges. This paper motivates work on filtering SMS spam and reviews recent devel- opments in SMS spam filtering. The paper also discusses the issues with data collection and availability for furthering research in this area, analyses a large corpus of SMS spam, and provides some initial benchmark results

Wild Patterns: Ten Years After the Rise of Adversarial Machine Learning

Learning-based pattern classifiers, including deep networks, have shown impressive performance in several application domains, ranging from computer vision to cybersecurity. However, it has also been shown that adversarial input perturbations carefully crafted either at training or at test time can easily subvert their predictions. The vulnerability of machine learning to such wild patterns (also referred to as adversarial examples), along with the design of suitable countermeasures, have been investigated in the research field of adversarial machine learning. In this work, we provide a thorough overview of the evolution of this research area over the last ten years and beyond, starting from pioneering, earlier work on the security of non-deep learning algorithms up to more recent work aimed to understand the security properties of deep learning algorithms, in the context of computer vision and cybersecurity tasks. We report interesting connections between these apparently-different lines of work, highlighting common misconceptions related to the security evaluation of machine-learning algorithms. We review the main threat models and attacks defined to this end, and discuss the main limitations of current work, along with the corresponding future challenges towards the design of more secure learning algorithms.Comment: Accepted for publication on Pattern Recognition, 201