Off-the-Hook: An Efficient and Usable Client-Side Phishing Prevention Application

Phishing is a major problem on the Web. Despite the significant attention it has received over the years, there has been no definitive solution. While the state-of-the-art solutions have reasonably good performance, they suffer from several drawbacks including potential to compromise user privacy, difficulty of detecting phishing websites whose content change dynamically, and reliance on features that are too dependent on the training data. To address these limitations we present a new approach for detecting phishing webpages in real-time as they are visited by a browser. It relies on modeling inherent phisher limitations stemming from the constraints they face while building a webpage. Consequently, the implementation of our approach, Off-the-Hook, exhibits several notable properties including high accuracy, brand-independence and good language-independence, speed of decision, resilience to dynamic phish and resilience to evolution in phishing techniques. Off-the-Hook is implemented as a fully-client-side browser add-on, which preserves user privacy. In addition, Off-the-Hook identifies the target website that a phishing webpage is attempting to mimic and includes this target in its warning. We evaluated Off-the-Hook in two different user studies. Our results show that users prefer Off-the-Hook warnings to Firefox warnings.Phishing is a major problem on the Web. Despite the significant attention it has received over the years, there has been no definitive solution. While the state-of-the-art solutions have reasonably good performance, they suffer from several drawbacks including potential to compromise user privacy, difficulty of detecting phishing websites whose content change dynamically, and reliance on features that are too dependent on the training data. To address these limitations we present a new approach for detecting phishing webpages in real-time as they are visited by a browser. It relies on modeling inherent phisher limitations stemming from the constraints they face while building a webpage. Consequently, the implementation of our approach, Off-the-Hook, exhibits several notable properties including high accuracy, brand-independence and good language-independence, speed of decision, resilience to dynamic phish and resilience to evolution in phishing techniques. Off-the-Hook is implemented as a fully-client-side browser add-on, which preserves user privacy. In addition, Off-the-Hook identifies the target website that a phishing webpage is attempting to mimic and includes this target in its warning. We evaluated Off-the-Hook in two different user studies. Our results show that users prefer Off-the-Hook warnings to Firefox warnings.Non Peer reviewe

Refining the PoinTER “human firewall” pentesting framework

PurposePenetration tests have become a valuable tool in the cyber security defence strategy, in terms of detecting vulnerabilities. Although penetration testing has traditionally focused on technical aspects, the field has started to realise the importance of the human in the organisation, and the need to ensure that humans are resistant to cyber-attacks. To achieve this, some organisations “pentest” their employees, testing their resilience and ability to detect and repel human-targeted attacks. In a previous paper we reported on PoinTER (Prepare TEst Remediate), a human pentesting framework, tailored to the needs of SMEs. In this paper, we propose improvements to refine our framework. The improvements are based on a derived set of ethical principles that have been subjected to ethical scrutiny.MethodologyWe conducted a systematic literature review of academic research, a review of actual hacker techniques, industry recommendations and official body advice related to social engineering techniques. To meet our requirements to have an ethical human pentesting framework, we compiled a list of ethical principles from the research literature which we used to filter out techniques deemed unethical.FindingsDrawing on social engineering techniques from academic research, reported by the hacker community, industry recommendations and official body advice and subjecting each technique to ethical inspection, using a comprehensive list of ethical principles, we propose the refined GDPR compliant and privacy respecting PoinTER Framework. The list of ethical principles, we suggest, could also inform ethical technical pentests.OriginalityPrevious work has considered penetration testing humans, but few have produced a comprehensive framework such as PoinTER. PoinTER has been rigorously derived from multiple sources and ethically scrutinised through inspection, using a comprehensive list of ethical principles derived from the research literature

Enhanced Security for Preventing Man-in-the-Middle Attacks in Authentication, DataEntry and Transaction Verification

There is increasing coverage in the literature highlighting threats to online financial systems. Attacks range from the prevalent reverse social engineering technique known as phishing; where spam emails are sent to customers with links to fake websites, to Trojans that monitor a customer’s account log on process that captures authentication details that are later replayed for financial gain. This ultimately results in loss of monetary funds for affected victims. As technological advances continue to influence the way society makes payment for goods and services, the requirement for more advanced security approaches for transaction verification in the online environment increases. This paper has three main purposes. The first is to detail the current threats and vulnerabilities to online financial systems and in particular online banking, from the selected literature. The second is to present the known prevention techniques for protecting against these attacks. The third is to present a conceptual model for authentication, data entry and transaction verification. It is suggested that the design adds another layer of security to existing methods to either prevent a MitM attack or to make the procedure of capturing and reassembling customer log on and transaction details more computationally and time intensive than what it is worth to an attacker. The model is based on a graphical authentication application previously developed called Authentigraph

Man in the Browser Attacks

In the present world, everyone uses the Internet and to access the internet they would need to use a browser. Unfortunately, the benefits of the Web are also available to hackers to exploit its weaknesses. Man-in-the-Browser (MITB) attacks are utilized through Trojan malware that infects an Internet browser. This attack is dangerous because of its ability to hide from anti-virus software and steal information from a user from the browser. MITB is able to see information within the browser since no encryption occurs in a browser. This is a serious threat to financial institutions and many other secret institutions as well. No one is safe from a MITB once it is installed because it easily bypasses the security mechanisms we all rely on. This paper explains what MITB attacks are, and how dangerous are those, and how it can be identified and how can we prevent it by discussing various preventive techniques and its effectiveness. This paper will also help to create awareness to the people about this attac

NoFish; Total Anti-Phishing Protection System

Phishing attacks have been identified by researchers as one of the major cyber-attack vectors which the general public has to face today. Although software companies launch new anti-phishing products, these products cannot prevent all the phishing attacks. The proposed solution, 201C;No Fish201D; is a total anti-phishing protection system created especially for end-users as well as for organizations. In this paper, a realtime anti-phishing system, which has been implemented using four main phishing detection mechanisms, is proposed. The system has the following distinguishing properties from related studies in the literature: language independence, use of a considerable amount of phishing and legitimate data