Inside a phisher's mind: Understanding the anti-phishing ecosystem through phishing kit analysis

Abstract

Phishing attacks are becoming increasingly prevalent: 2016 saw more phishing attacks than any previous year on record according to the Anti-Phishing Working Group. At the same time, the growing level of sophistication of cybercriminals must be understood for the development of effective anti-phishing systems, as phishers have extensive control over the content they serve to their victims. By examining two large, real-world datasets of phishing kits and URLs from 2016 through mid-2017, we paint a clear picture of today's anti-phishing ecosystem while inferring the higher-level motives and thought processes of phishers. We analyze the nature of server-side .htaccess filtering techniques used by phishers to evade detection by the security community. We also propose a new generic classification scheme for phishing URLs which corresponds to modern social engineering techniques and reveals a correlation between URL type and compromised infrastructure use. Our analysis identifies measures that can be taken by the security community to defeat phishers' countermeasures and increase the likelihood of a timely response to phishing. We discover that phishers have a keen awareness of the infrastructure used against them, which illustrates the ever-evolving struggle between cybercriminals and security researchers and motivates future work to positively impact online security.