Biblio

There is growing evidence that spear phishing campaigns are increasingly pervasive, sophisticated, and remain the starting points of more advanced attacks. Current campaign identification and attribution process heavily relies on manual efforts and is inefficient in gathering intelligence in a timely manner. It is ideal that we can automatically attribute spear phishing emails to known campaigns and achieve early detection of new campaigns using limited labelled emails as the seeds. In this paper, we introduce four categories of email profiling features that capture various characteristics of spear phishing emails. Building on these features, we implement and evaluate an affinity graph based semi-supervised learning model for campaign attribution and detection. We demonstrate that our system, using only 25 labelled emails, achieves 0.9 F1 score with a 0.01 false positive rate in known campaign attribution, and is able to detect previously unknown spear phishing campaigns, achieving 100% 'darkmoon', over 97% of 'samkams' and 91% of 'bisrala' campaign detection using 246 labelled emails in our experiments.

Nowadays, phishing is one of the most usual web threats with regards to the significant growth of the World Wide Web in volume over time. Phishing attackers always use new (zero-day) and sophisticated techniques to deceive online customers. Hence, it is necessary that the anti-phishing system be real-time and fast and also leverages from an intelligent phishing detection solution. Here, we develop a reliable detection system which can adaptively match the changing environment and phishing websites. Our method is an online and feature-rich machine learning technique to discriminate the phishing and legitimate websites. Since the proposed approach extracts different types of discriminative features from URLs and webpages source code, it is an entirely client-side solution and does not require any service from the third-party. The experimental results highlight the robustness and competitiveness of our anti-phishing system to distinguish the phishing and legitimate websites.

A mail spoofing attack is a harmful activity that modifies the source of the mail and trick users into believing that the message originated from a trusted sender whereas the actual sender is the attacker. Based on the previous work, this paper analyzes the transmission process of an email. Our work identifies new attacks suitable for bypassing SPF, DMARC, and Mail User Agent’s protection mechanisms. We can forge much more realistic emails to penetrate the famous mail service provider like Tencent by conducting the attack. By completing a large-scale experiment on these well-known mail service providers, we find some of them are affected by the related vulnerabilities. Some of the bypass methods are different from previous work. Our work found that this potential security problem can only be effectively protected when all email service providers have a standard view of security and can configure appropriate security policies for each email delivery node. In addition, we also propose a mitigate method to defend against these attacks. We hope our work can draw the attention of email service providers and users and effectively reduce the potential risk of phishing email attacks on them.

Phishing is referred as an attempt to obtain sensitive information, such as usernames, passwords, and credit card details (and, indirectly, money), for malicious reasons, by disguising as a trustworthy entity in an electronic communication [1]. Hackers and malicious users, often use Emails as phishing tools to obtain the personal data of legitimate users, by sending Emails with authentic identities, legitimate content, but also with malicious URL, which help them to steal consumer's data. The high dimensional data in phishing context contains large number of redundant features that significantly elevate the classification error. Additionally, the time required to perform classification increases with the number of features. So extracting complex Features from phishing Emails requires us to determine which Features are relevant and fundamental in phishing detection. The dominant approaches in phishing are based on machine learning techniques; these rely on manual feature engineering, which is time consuming. On the other hand, deep learning is a promising alternative to traditional methods. The main idea of deep learning techniques is to learn complex features extracted from data with minimum external contribution [2]. In this paper, we propose new phishing detection and prevention approach, based first on our previous spam filter [3] to classify textual content of Email. Secondly it's based on Autoencoder and on Denoising Autoencoder (DAE), to extract relevant and robust features set of URL (to which the website is actually directed), therefore the features space could be reduced considerably, and thus decreasing the phishing detection time.

This paper investigates what cues people use to spot a phishing email when the email is spoken back to them by the Alexa voice assistant, instead of read on a screen. We configured Alexa to read there emails to a sample of 52 participants and ask for their phishing evaluations. We also asked a control group of another 52 participants to evaluate these emails on a regular screen to compare the plausibility of phishing pretexting in voice assistant environments. The results suggest that Alexa can be used for pretexting users that lack phishing awareness to receive and act upon a relatively urgent email from an authoritative sender. Inspecting the sender (authority cue”) and relying on their personal experiences helped participants with higher phishing awareness to use Alexa towards a preliminary email screening to flag an email as potentially “phishing.”

The aim of this paper is to examine noteworthy cyberattacks that have taken place against ICS and SCADA systems and to analyse them. This paper also proposes a new classification scheme based on the severity of the attack. Since the information revolution, computers and associated technologies have impacted almost all aspects of daily life, and this is especially true of the industrial sector where one of the leading trends is that of automation. This widespread proliferation of computers and computer networks has also made it easier for malicious actors to gain access to these systems and networks and carry out harmful activities.

In the prevailing situation, the sports like economic, industrial, cultural, social, and governmental activities are carried out in the online world. Today's international is particularly dependent on the wireless era and protective these statistics from cyber-assaults is a hard hassle. The reason for cyber-assaults is to damage thieve the credentials. In a few other cases, cyber-attacks ought to have a navy or political functions. The damages are PC viruses, facts break, DDS, and exceptional attack vectors. To this surrender, various companies use diverse answers to prevent harm because of cyberattacks. Cyber safety follows actual-time data at the modern-day-day IT data. So, far, numerous techniques have proposed with the resource of researchers around the area to prevent cyber-attacks or lessen the harm due to them. The cause of this has a look at is to survey and comprehensively evaluate the usual advances supplied around cyber safety and to analyse the traumatic situations, weaknesses, and strengths of the proposed techniques. Different sorts of attacks are taken into consideration in element. In addition, evaluation of various cyber-attacks had been finished through the platform called Kali Linux. It is predicted that the complete assessment has a have a study furnished for college students, teachers, IT, and cyber safety researchers might be beneficial.

Now a days there are many online social networks (OSN) which are very popular among Internet users and use this platform for finding new connections, sharing their activities and thoughts. Twitter is such social media platforms which is very popular among this users. Survey says, it has more than 310 million monthly users who are very active and post around 500+ million tweets in a day and this attracts, the spammer or cyber-criminal to misuse this platform for their malicious benefits. Product advertisement, phishing true users, pornography propagation, stealing the trending news, sharing malicious link to get the victims for making money are the common example of the activities of spammers. In Aug-2014, Twitter made public that 8.5% of its active Twitter users (monthly) that is approx. 23+ million users, who have automatically contacted their servers for regular updates. Thus for a spam free environment in twitter, it is greatly required to detect and filter these spammer from the legitimate users. Here in our research paper, effectiveness & features of twitter spam detection, various methods are summarized with their benefits and limitations are presented. [1]

The main objective of this research is to increase security awareness against phishing attacks in the education sector by teaching users about phishing URLs. The educational media was made based on references from several previous studies that were used as basic references. Development of antiphishing game framework educational media using the extended DPE framework. Participants in this study were vocational and college students in the technology field. The respondents included vocational and college students, each with as many as 30 respondents. To assess the level of awareness and understanding of phishing, especially phishing URLs, participants will be given a pre-test before playing the game, and after completing the game, the application will be given a posttest. A paired t-test was used to answer the research hypothesis. The results of data analysis show differences in the results of increasing identification of URL phishing by respondents before and after using educational media of the anti-phishing game framework in increasing security awareness against URL phishing attacks. More serious game development can be carried out in the future to increase user awareness, particularly in phishing or other security issues, and can be implemented for general users who do not have a background in technology.

Users prefer to do e-banking and e-shopping now-a-days because of the exponential growth of the internet. Because of this paradigm shift, hackers are finding umpteen ways to steal our personal information and critical details like details of debit and credit cards, by disguising themselves as reputed websites, just by changing the spelling or making minor modifications to the URL. Identifying whether an URL is benign or malicious is a challenging job, because it makes use of the weakness of the user. While there are several works carried out to detect phishing websites, they only use heuristic methods and list based techniques and therefore couldn't avoid phishing effectively. In this paper an anti-phishing system was proposed to protect the users. It uses an ensemble model that uses both LSTM and CNN with a massive data set containing nearly 2,00,000 URLs, that is balanced. After analyzing the accuracy of different existing approaches, it has been found that the ensemble model that uses both LSTM and CNN performed better with an accuracy of 96% and the precision is 97% respectively which is far better than the existing solutions.

Phishing is a technique aimed to imitate an official websites of any company such as banks, institutes, etc. The purpose of phishing is to theft private and sensitive credentials of users such as password, username or PIN. Phishing detection is a technique to deal with this kind of malicious activity. In this paper we propose a method able to discriminate between web pages aimed to perform phishing attacks and legitimate ones. We exploit state of the art machine learning algorithms in order to build models using indicators that are able to detect phishing activities.

While backtracking analysis has been successful in assisting the investigation of complex security attacks, it faces a critical dependency explosion problem. To address this problem, security analysts currently need to tune backtracking analysis manually with different case-specific heuristics. However, existing systems fail to fulfill two important system requirements to achieve effective backtracking analysis. First, there need flexible abstractions to express various types of heuristics. Second, the system needs to be responsive in providing updates so that the progress of backtracking analysis can be frequently inspected, which typically involves multiple rounds of manual tuning. In this paper, we propose a novel system, APTrace, to meet both of the above requirements. As we demonstrate in the evaluation, security analysts can effectively express heuristics to reduce more than 99.5% of irrelevant events in the backtracking analysis of real-world attack cases. To improve the responsiveness of backtracking analysis, we present a novel execution-window partitioning algorithm that significantly reduces the waiting time between two consecutive updates (especially, 57 times reduction for the top 1% waiting time).

This study was conducted in order to assess the E-security behavior of students in a large higher educational institutions in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Specifically, it sought to determine the current state of students' E-security behavior in the aspects of malware, password usage, data handling, phishing, social engineering, and online scam. An E- Security Behavior Survey Instrument (EBSI) was used to determine the status of security behavior of the participants in doing their computing activities. To complement the survey tool, focus group discussions were conducted to elicit specific experiences and insights of the participants relative to E-security. The results of the study shows that the overall E-security behavior among students in higher education in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is moderately favorable. Specifically, the investigation reveals that the students favorably behave when it comes to phishing, social engineering, and online scam. However, they uncertainly behave on malware issues, password usage, and data handling.

The vertiginous technological advance related to globalization and the new digital era has led to the design of new techniques and tools that deal with the risks of technology and information. Terms such as "cybersecurity" stand out, which corresponds to that area of computer science that is responsible for the development and implementation of information protection mechanisms and technological infrastructure, in order to deal with cyberattacks. Phishing is a crime that uses social engineering and technical subterfuge to steal personal identity data and financial account credentials from users, representing a high economic and financial risk worldwide, both for individuals and for large organizations. The objective of this research is to determine the ways to prevent phishing, by analyzing the characteristics of this computer fraud, the various existing modalities and the main prevention strategies, in order to increase the knowledge of users about this. subject, highlighting the importance of adequate training that allows establishing efficient mechanisms to detect and block phishing.

Nowadays one-time passwords are used in a lot of areas of information technologies including e-commerce. A few vulnerabilities in authentication protocols based on one-time passwords are widely known. In current work, we analyze authentication protocols based on one-time passwords and their vulnerabilities. Both simple and complicated protocols which are implementing cryptographic algorithms are reviewed. For example, an analysis of relatively old Lamport's hash-chain protocol is provided. At the same time, we examine HOTP and TOTP protocols which are actively used nowadays. The main result of the work are conclusions about the security of reviewed protocols based on one-time passwords.

The Security Behavior Intentions Scale (SeBIS) measures the computer security attitudes of end-users. Because intentions are a prerequisite for planned behavior, the scale could therefore be useful for predicting users' computer security behaviors. We performed three experiments to identify correlations between each of SeBIS's four sub-scales and relevant computer security behaviors. We found that testing high on the awareness sub-scale correlated with correctly identifying a phishing website; testing high on the passwords sub-scale correlated with creating passwords that could not be quickly cracked; testing high on the updating sub-scale correlated with applying software updates; and testing high on the securement sub-scale correlated with smartphone lock screen usage (e.g., PINs). Our results indicate that SeBIS predicts certain computer security behaviors and that it is a reliable and valid tool that should be used in future research.

Whenever we talk about big data, the concern is always about the security of the data. In recent days the most heard about technology is the Natural Language Processing. This new and trending technology helps in solving the ever ending security problems which are not completely solved using big data. Starting with the big data security issues, this paper deals with addressing the topics related to cyber security and information security using the Natural Language Processing technology. Including the well-known cyber-attacks such as phishing identification and spam detection, this paper also addresses issues on information assurance and security such as detection of Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) in DNS and vulnerability analysis. The goal of this paper is to provide the overview of how natural language processing can be used to address cyber security issues.

Phishing attacks are prevalent and humans are central to this online identity theft attack, which aims to steal victims' sensitive and personal information such as username, password, and online banking details. There are many antiphishing tools developed to thwart against phishing attacks. Since humans are the weakest link in phishing, it is important to educate them to detect and avoid phishing attacks. One can argue self-efficacy is one of the most important determinants of individual's motivation in phishing threat avoidance behaviour, which has co-relation with knowledge. The proposed research endeavours on the user's self-efficacy in order to enhance the individual's phishing threat avoidance behaviour through their motivation. Using social cognitive theory, we explored that various knowledge attributes such as observational (vicarious) knowledge, heuristic knowledge and structural knowledge contributes immensely towards the individual's self-efficacy to enhance phishing threat prevention behaviour. A theoretical framework is then developed depicting the mechanism that links knowledge attributes, self-efficacy, threat avoidance motivation that leads to users' threat avoidance behaviour. Finally, a gaming prototype is designed incorporating the knowledge elements identified in this research that aimed to enhance individual's self-efficacy in phishing threat avoidance behaviour.

The COVID-19 pandemic introduced novel incentives for adversaries to exploit the state of turmoil. As we have witnessed with the increase in for instance phishing attacks and domain name registrations piggybacking the COVID-19 brand name. In this paper, we perform an analysis at Internet-scale of COVID-19 domain name registrations during the early stages of the virus' spread, and investigate the rationales behind them. We leverage the DomainTools COVID-19 Threat List and additional measurements to analyze over 150,000 domains registered between January 1st 2020 and May 1st 2020. We identify two key rationales for covid-related domain registrations. Online marketing, by either redirecting traffic or hosting a commercial service on the domain, and domain parking, by registering domains containing popular COVID-19 keywords, presumably anticipating a profit when reselling the domain later on. We also highlight three public policy take-aways that can counteract this domain registration behavior.

We are confronted with the threat from the theft of user-id / password information caused by phishing attacks. Now authentication by using the user-id and password is no longer safe. We can use the PKI-based authentication as a safer authentication mechanism. In our university, Japan Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (JAIST), we deployed On Demand Digital Certificate Issuing System for our users, and employ the PKI-based client certificates for log-on to web application, connecting to wireless network (including eduroam), using VPN service, and email sender signing. In addition, National In-stitute of Information (NII), which are providing common ICT infrastructure services for Japanese universities and institutes, started a service to issue client certificates in this year. So use of the electronic certificates will become more popular within a few years in Japan. However, there are not so enough cases deploying the electronic certificate based authentication in University infrastructure, we still has many tips and issues on operating this. In this paper, we introduce the use case of the electronic certificate in JAIST, the challenges and issues, and consider the future prospects.

Cross site scripting (XSS) attack is one of the attacks on the web. It brings session hijack with HTTP cookies, information collection with fake HTML input form and phishing with dummy sites. As a countermeasure of XSS attack, machine learning has attracted a lot of attention. There are existing researches in which SVM, Random Forest and SCW are used for the detection of the attack. However, in the researches, there are problems that the size of data set is too small or unbalanced, and that preprocessing method for vectorization of strings causes misclassification. The highest accuracy of the classification was 98% in existing researches. Therefore, in this paper, we improved the preprocessing method for vectorization by using word2vec to find the frequency of appearance and co-occurrence of the words in XSS attack scripts. Moreover, we also used a large data set to decrease the deviation of the data. Furthermore, we evaluated the classification results with two procedures. One is an inappropriate procedure which some researchers tend to select by mistake. The other is an appropriate procedure which can be applied to an attack detection filter in the real environment.

In this work, we applied deep semantic analysis, and machine learning and deep learning techniques, to capture inherent characteristics of email text, and classify emails as phishing or non -phishing.

This article discusses how a system of Identification: Friend or Foe (IFF) can be implemented in email to make users less susceptible to phishing attacks.

Phishing continues to remain a lucrative market for cyber criminals, mostly because of the vulnerable human element. Through emails and spoofed-websites, phishers exploit almost any opportunity using major events, considerable financial awards, fake warnings and the trusted reputation of established organizations, as a basis to gain their victims' trust. For many years, humans have often been referred to as the `weakest link' towards protecting information. To gain their victims' trust, phishers continue to use sophisticated looking emails and spoofed websites to trick them, and rely on their victims' lack of knowledge, lax security behavior and organizations' inadequate security measures towards protecting itself and their clients. As such, phishing security controls and vulnerabilities can arguably be classified into three main elements namely human factors (H), organizational aspects (O) and technological controls (T). All three of these elements have the common feature of human involvement and as such, security gaps are inevitable. Each element also functions as both security control and security vulnerability. A holistic framework towards combatting phishing is required whereby the human feature in all three of these elements is enhanced by means of a security education, training and awareness programme. This paper discusses the educational factors required to form part of a holistic framework, addressing the HOT elements as well as the relationships between these elements towards combatting phishing. The development of this framework uses the principles of design science to ensure that it is developed with rigor. Furthermore, this paper reports on the verification of the framework.

Quick response (QR) codes are currently used ubiq-uitously. Their interaction protocol design is initially unsecured. It forces users to scan QR codes, which makes it harder to differentiate a genuine code from a malicious one. Intruders can change the original QR code and make it fake, which can lead to phishing websites that collect sensitive data. The interaction model can be improved and made more secure by adding some modifications to the backend side of the application. This paper addresses the vulnerabilities of QR codes and recommends improvements in security design. Furthermore, two state-of-the-art algorithms, Digital Signature (DS) and Elliptic Curve Digital Signature (ECDS), are analytically compared to determine their strengths in QR code security.