I'm SPARTACUS, No, I'm SPARTACUS

Abstract

Phishing is a ubiquitous and increasingly sophisticated online threat. To evade mitigations, phishers try to "cloak" malicious content from defenders to delay their appearance on blacklists, while still presenting the phishing payload to victims. This cat-and-mouse game is variable and fast-moving, with many distinct cloaking methods---we construct a dataset identifying 2,933 real-world phishing kits that implement cloaking mechanisms. These kits use information from the host, browser, and HTTP request to classify traffic as either anti-phishing entity or potential victim and change their behavior accordingly.