In the June 2007 edition of RSA Security Phishing Newsreleased on July 5th, RSA’s Anti-Fraud Command Center uncovered a newtype of phishing kit, which is “actually a single file which creates anentire phishing site on a compromised server when double-clicked on,similar to .exe installation files.” According to the report,traditional phishing kits include all of the relevant files which mustbe installed one by one in the appropriate directories on the serverthat is controlled by the phisher. The new kit instead, “saves thephishers time and effort, by automating the site installation process.”
This news received quite a bit of press coverage, but does it reallychange the rules of the game? Our feeling is that it doesn’t: mostphishing sites are currently hosted on compromised Web servers, wherephishers have been able to upload files using one of the (many)unpatched vulnerabilities lying in the Web application code. Phishingkit configuration is usually done on a phisher...
In recent months, Symantec has detected a number of phishing sitesthat have been hosted on government URLs. In June alone, phishing siteswere identified on government sites from the following countries:Thailand (.go.th), Indonesia (.go.id), Hungary (.gov.hu), Bangladesh(.gov.bd), Argentina (.gov.ar), Sri Lanka (.gov.lk), Ukraine (.gov.ua),China (.gov.cn), Brazil (.gov.br), Bosnia and Herzegovina (.gov.ba),Columbia (.gov.co), and Malaysia (.gov.my).
This might come as a surprise to some people, as governments arethought to have very secure computer systems. However, the quantity ofphishing sites hosted on government domains around the world seems tosuggest otherwise. These fraudulent sites look like legitimate Websites and are designed to trick users into divulging personalinformation such as government-issued identity numbers, bank password,or credit card numbers. Most phishing sites are placed on governmentWeb servers by hackers who have gained access to the server...
In my last blog entry, Pre-Phishing Recon for Context Aware Attacks,I talked about how generic phishing messages can be used to collectcontextual information for more advanced phishing attacks. In thisblog, I will describe two such types of advanced phishing attacks.
First, I must note that a pre-phishing recon attack is not the only waythat attackers can get their hands on contextual information about aperson. Attackers can also search the internet for public documentscontaining personally-identifying information. They can buy informationabout a person on an underground economy server, and they can get theinformation through a corporate data breach. In any case, if anattacker gets access to some personal information about someone, he orshe can attempt what is called a context-aware phishing attack.
Yesterday, Microsoft announced the results of a commissioned analysis of anti-phishing solutions (http://www.3sharp.com/projects/antiphishing/gone-phishing.pdf). Being an active member of the anti-phishing community, we were surprised that the report did not look at Symantec's new heuristic anti-phishing protection features. These are included in Norton Internet Security 2007 and the upcoming Norton Confidential.
For many reasons, we are excited about these advanced anti-phishing capabilities, but were disappointed that 3Sharp LLC, the company that conducted the analysis on behalf of Microsoft, did not include at least one of our solutions in the comparison mix. Our underlying heuristic detection technology comes from WholeSecurity, a leading innovator of behavioral security solutions that Symantec acquired in October 2005. WholeSecurity learned early on that the...
