Characteristics and responsibilities involved in a Phishing attack

Abstract

'Phishing' is a fraudulent activity defined as the creation of a replica of an existing Web page to fool a user into submitting personal, financial, or password data. There are security service guidelines for both software security and web site security development environments. Developers use these guidelines when planning new systems (or during re-engineering of existing systems) to ensure a secure environment. The purpose of this paper is two-fold: firstly to consider the characteristics of a phishing attack and to identify a list of issues relevant to it; and secondly, to compare the nature of a phishing attack with the security services guidelines provided and to pinpoint the weakness(es) of phishing attacks if these guidelines are adhered to.