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

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

Reverse Proxy Framework using Sanitization Technique for Intrusion Prevention in Database

With the increasing importance of the internet in our day to day life, data security in web application has become very crucial. Ever increasing on line and real time transaction services have led to manifold rise in the problems associated with the database security. Attacker uses illegal and unauthorized approaches to hijack the confidential information like username, password and other vital details. Hence the real time transaction requires security against web based attacks. SQL injection and cross site scripting attack are the most common application layer attack. The SQL injection attacker pass SQL statement through a web applications input fields, URL or hidden parameters and get access to the database or update it. The attacker take a benefit from user provided data in such a way that the users input is handled as a SQL code. Using this vulnerability an attacker can execute SQL commands directly on the database. SQL injection attacks are most serious threats which take users input and integrate it into SQL query. Reverse Proxy is a technique which is used to sanitize the users inputs that may transform into a database attack. In this technique a data redirector program redirects the users input to the proxy server before it is sent to the application server. At the proxy server, data cleaning algorithm is triggered using a sanitizing application. In this framework we include detection and sanitization of the tainted information being sent to the database and innovate a new prototype.Comment: 9 pages, 6 figures, 3 tables; CIIT 2013 International Conference, Mumba

Mayall:a framework for desktop JavaScript auditing and post-exploitation analysis

Writing desktop applications in JavaScript offers developers the opportunity to write cross-platform applications with cutting edge capabilities. However in doing so, they are potentially submitting their code to a number of unsanctioned modifications from malicious actors. Electron is one such JavaScript application framework which facilitates this multi-platform out-the-box paradigm and is based upon the Node.js JavaScript runtime --- an increasingly popular server-side technology. In bringing this technology to the client-side environment, previously unrealized risks are exposed to users due to the powerful system programming interface that Node.js exposes. In a concerted effort to highlight previously unexposed risks in these rapidly expanding frameworks, this paper presents the Mayall Framework, an extensible toolkit aimed at JavaScript security auditing and post-exploitation analysis. The paper also exposes fifteen highly popular Electron applications and demonstrates that two thirds of applications were found to be using known vulnerable elements with high CVSS scores. Moreover, this paper discloses a wide-reaching and overlooked vulnerability within the Electron Framework which is a direct byproduct of shipping the runtime unaltered with each application, allowing malicious actors to modify source code and inject covert malware inside verified and signed applications without restriction. Finally, a number of injection vectors are explored and appropriate remediations are proposed

Cloud based testing of business applications and web services

This paper deals with testing of applications based on the principles of cloud computing. It is aimed to describe options of testing business software in clouds (cloud testing). It identifies the needs for cloud testing tools including multi-layer testing; service level agreement (SLA) based testing, large scale simulation, and on-demand test environment. In a cloud-based model, ICT services are distributed and accessed over networks such as intranet or internet, which offer large data centers deliver on demand, resources as a service, eliminating the need for investments in specific hardware, software, or on data center infrastructure. Businesses can apply those new technologies in the contest of intellectual capital management to lower the cost and increase competitiveness and also earnings. Based on comparison of the testing tools and techniques, the paper further investigates future trend of cloud based testing tools research and development. It is also important to say that this comparison and classification of testing tools describes a new area and it has not yet been done

Using HTML5 to Prevent Detection of Drive-by-Download Web Malware

The web is experiencing an explosive growth in the last years. New technologies are introduced at a very fast-pace with the aim of narrowing the gap between web-based applications and traditional desktop applications. The results are web applications that look and feel almost like desktop applications while retaining the advantages of being originated from the web. However, these advancements come at a price. The same technologies used to build responsive, pleasant and fully-featured web applications, can also be used to write web malware able to escape detection systems. In this article we present new obfuscation techniques, based on some of the features of the upcoming HTML5 standard, which can be used to deceive malware detection systems. The proposed techniques have been experimented on a reference set of obfuscated malware. Our results show that the malware rewritten using our obfuscation techniques go undetected while being analyzed by a large number of detection systems. The same detection systems were able to correctly identify the same malware in its original unobfuscated form. We also provide some hints about how the existing malware detection systems can be modified in order to cope with these new techniques.Comment: This is the pre-peer reviewed version of the article: \emph{Using HTML5 to Prevent Detection of Drive-by-Download Web Malware}, which has been published in final form at \url{http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/sec.1077}. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archivin