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Phishing

2007 Schools Wikipedia Selection. Related subjects: Websites and the Internet


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   This phishing attempt, disguised as an official email from a
   (fictional) bank, attempts to trick the bank's members into giving away
   their account information by "confirming" it at the phisher's linked
   website.
   Enlarge
   This phishing attempt, disguised as an official email from a
   (fictional) bank, attempts to trick the bank's members into giving away
   their account information by "confirming" it at the phisher's linked
   website.

   In computing, phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering
   techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive
   information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading
   as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication.
   Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message,
   although phone contact has been used as well. Attempts to deal with the
   growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user
   training, and technical measures.

   The first recorded mention of phishing is on the
   alt.online-service.america-online Usenet newsgroup on January 2, 1996,
   although the term may have appeared even earlier in the print edition
   of the hacker magazine 2600. The term phishing is a variant of fishing,
   probably influenced by phreaking, and alludes to the use of
   increasingly sophisticated lures to "fish" for users' financial
   information and passwords. The word may also be linked to leetspeak, in
   which ph is a common substitution for f. The popular theory that it is
   a portmanteau of password harvesting is an example of folk etymology.

Early phishing on AOL

   Those who would later phish on AOL during the 1990s originally used
   fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to create accounts
   on AOL, which could last weeks or even months. After AOL brought in
   measures in late 1995 to prevent this, early AOL crackers resorted to
   phishing for legitimate accounts.

   Phishing on AOL was closely associated with the warez community that
   exchanged pirated software. A phisher might pose as an AOL staff member
   and send an instant message to a potential victim, asking him to reveal
   his password. In order to lure the victim into giving up sensitive
   information the message might include text such as "verify your
   account" or "confirm billing information". Once the victim had
   submitted his password, the attacker could access and use the victim's
   account for criminal purposes, such as spamming. Both phishing and
   warezing on AOL generally required custom-written programs, such as
   AOHell. Phishing became so prevalent on AOL that they added a line on
   all instant messages stating: "no one working at AOL will ask for your
   password or billing information".

   After 1997, AOL's policy enforcement with respect to phishing and warez
   became stricter and forced pirated software off AOL servers. AOL
   simultaneously developed a system to promptly deactivate accounts
   involved in phishing, often before the victims could respond. The
   shutting down of the warez scene on AOL caused most phishers to leave
   the service, and many phishers — often young teens — grew out of the
   habit.

Recent phishing attempts

   A chart showing the increase in phishing reports from October 2004 to
   June 2005.
   Enlarge
   A chart showing the increase in phishing reports from October 2004 to
   June 2005.

   More recent phishing attempts have targeted the customers of banks and
   online payment services. E-mails supposedly from the Internal Revenue
   Service have also been used to glean sensitive data from U.S.
   taxpayers. While the first such examples were sent indiscriminately in
   the hope of finding a customer of a given bank or service, recent
   research has shown that phishers may in principle be able to establish
   what bank a potential victim has a relationship with, and then send an
   appropriate spoofed email to this victim.. Targeted versions of
   phishing have been termed spear phishing. Social networking sites are
   also a target of phishing, since the personal details in such sites can
   be used in identity theft. Experiments show a success rate of over 70%
   for phishing attacks on social networks.

Phishing techniques

   Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed
   to make a link in an email appear to belong to the spoofed
   organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common
   tricks used by phishers, such as this example URL,
   http://www.yourbank.com.example.com/. Another common trick is to make
   the anchor text for a link appear to be a valid URL when the link
   actually goes to the phishers' site.

   One method of spoofing links use web addresses containing the @ symbol,
   which are used to include a username and password in a web URL
   (contrary to the standard). For example, the link
   http://www.google.com@members.tripod.com/ might deceive a casual
   observer into believing that the link will open a page on
   www.google.com, whereas the link actually directs the browser to a page
   on members.tripod.com, using a username of www.google.com; were there
   no such user, the page would open normally. Such URLs were subsequently
   disabled in Internet Explorer, with the Mozilla and Opera web browsers
   opting instead to present a warning message and give users the option
   of continuing to the site or cancelling.

   Some phishing scams use JavaScript commands in order to alter the
   address bar. This is done either by placing a picture of the legitimate
   entity's URL over the address bar, or by closing the original address
   bar and opening a new one containing the legitimate URL.

   In another popular method of phishing, an attacker uses a bank or
   service's own scripts against the victim. These types of attacks (known
   as cross-site scripting) are particularly problematic, because they
   direct the user to sign in at their bank or service's own web page,
   where everything from the web address to the security certificates
   appears correct. In reality, the link to the website is crafted to
   carry out the attack, although it is very difficult to spot without
   specialist knowledge. Just such a flaw was used in 2006 against PayPal.

   A further problem with URLs has been found in the handling of
   Internationalized domain names (IDN) in web browsers, that might allow
   visually identical web addresses to lead to different, possibly
   malicious, websites. Despite the publicity surrounding the flaw, known
   as IDN spoofing or a homograph attack, no known phishing attacks have
   yet taken advantage of it.

   Not all phishing attacks require a fake website. In an incident in
   2006, messages that claimed to be from a bank told users to dial a
   phone number regarding a problem with their bank account. Once the
   phone number was dialed, prompts told users to enter their account
   numbers and PIN. The number was provided by a Voice over IP provider.

Phishing examples

   PayPal phishing example
   An example of a phishing email targeted at PayPal users.
   Enlarge
   An example of a phishing email targeted at PayPal users.

   In an example PayPal phish (right), spelling mistakes in the email and
   the presence of an IP address in the link (visible in the tooltip under
   the yellow box) are both clues that this is a phishing attempt. Another
   giveaway is the lack of a personal greeting, although the presence of
   personal details is not a guarantee of legitimacy.

   SouthTrust Bank example

   In this second example, targeted at SouthTrust Bank users, the phisher
   has used an image to make it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect
   by scanning for text commonly used in phishing emails.

          From: SouthTrust <support_id_99583160@southtrust.com>
          To: john.smith@example.com
          Subject: SouthTrust Bank: Important Notification
          Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:56:30 -0200 (22:56 BRT)

Damage caused by phishing

   The damage caused by phishing ranges from loss of access to email to
   substantial financial loss. This style of identity theft is becoming
   more popular, because of the ease with which unsuspecting people often
   divulge personal information to phishers, including credit card
   numbers, social security numbers, and mothers' maiden names. There are
   also fears that identity thieves can obtain some such information
   simply by accessing public records.

   Once this information is acquired, the phishers may use a person's
   details to create fake accounts in a victim's name, ruin a victim's
   credit, or even prevent victims from accessing their own accounts.

   It is estimated that between May 2004 and May 2005, approximately 1.2
   million computer users in the United States suffered losses caused by
   phishing, totaling approximately $929 million USD. U.S. businesses lose
   an estimated $2 billion USD a year as their clients become victims. In
   the United Kingdom losses from web banking fraud — mostly from phishing
   — almost doubled to £23.2m in 2005, from £12.2m in 2004, while 1 in 20
   users claimed to have lost out to phishing in 2005.

Anti-phishing

   There are several different techniques to combat phishing, including
   legislation and technology created specifically to protect against
   phishing.

Social responses

   One strategy for combating phishing is to train users to deal with
   phishing attempts. User education can be promising, especially where
   training provides direct feedback to the user on his success (or
   otherwise). One newer phishing tactic, which uses phishing emails
   targeted at a specific company, known as spear phishing, has been
   harnessed to train users at various locations, including West Point
   Military Academy. In a June 2004 experiment with spear phishing, 80% of
   500 West Point cadets who were sent a fake email were tricked into
   revealing personal information.

   Users who are contacted about an account needing to be "verified" can
   take steps to avoid phishing attempts by contacting the company that is
   the subject of the email to check that the email is legitimate or by
   typing in a trusted web address for the company's website into the
   address bar of their browser to bypass the link in the suspected
   phishing message.

   Nearly all legitimate email messages from companies to their customers
   will contain an item of information that is not readily available to
   phishers. Some companies, like PayPal, always address their customers
   by their username in emails, so if an email addresses a user in a
   generic fashion ("Dear PayPal customer") it is likely to be an attempt
   at phishing. Emails from banks and credit card companies will often
   include partial account numbers. Therefore, one should always be
   suspicious if the message does not contain specific personal
   information. Phishing attempts in early 2006, however, used such highly
   personalized information, making it unsafe to rely on personal
   information alone as a sign that a message is legitimate. Further,
   another recent study concluded in part that the presence of this
   information does not significantly affect the success rate of phishing
   attacks, suggesting that most users do not pay attention to such
   details anyway.

   The Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry and law enforcement
   association, has suggested that conventional phishing techniques could
   become obsolete in the future as people are increasingly aware of the
   social engineering techniques used by phishers. They propose that
   pharming and other uses of malware will become more common tools for
   stealing information.

Technical responses

   Anti-phishing software is available that may identify phishing contents
   on websites, act as a toolbar that displays the real domain name for
   the visited website, or spot phishing attempts in email. Microsoft's
   new IE7 browser, Mozilla's Firefox 2, and Opera from version 9.1 will
   include a form of anti-phishing technology, by which a site may be
   checked against a list of known phishing sites. If the site is a
   suspect the software may either warn a user or block the site outright.
   Firefox 2 uses Google anti-phishing software, which may also be
   installed under IE6. Spam filters also help protect users from
   phishers, because they reduce the number of phishing-related emails
   that users receive. An approach introduced in mid-2006 (similar in
   principle to using a hosts file to block web adverts) involves
   switching to using a special DNS service that filters out known
   phishing domains, which will work with any browser.

   Sites have added verification tools that allow users to see a secret
   image that the user selected in advance; if the image does not appear,
   then the site is not legitimate. Bank of America uses this together
   with challenge questions, which ask the user for information that
   should be known only to the user and the bank. This feature (and other
   forms of two-way authentication and two-factor authentication) is still
   susceptible to attack, such as that suffered by Scandinavian bank
   Nordea in late 2005.

Monitoring and takedown

   Several companies offer banks and other entities likely to suffer from
   phishing scams 24/7 services to monitor, analyze and assist in shutting
   down phishing websites. Individuals can contribute by reporting
   phishing to both volunteer and industry groups, such as PhishTank.

Legal responses

   On January 26, 2004, the FTC ( Federal Trade Commission) filed the
   first lawsuit against a suspected phisher. The defendant, a Californian
   teenager, allegedly created and used a webpage designed to look like
   the America Online website, so that he could steal credit card numbers.
   Other countries have followed the lead of the U.S. by tracing and
   arresting phishers. A phishing kingpin, Valdir Paulo de Almeida, was
   arrested in Brazil for leading one of the largest phishing crime rings,
   which in 2 years stole between $18 and $37 million USD. UK authorities
   jailed two men in June 2005 for their role in a phishing scam, in a
   case connected to the US Secret Service Operation Firewall, which
   targeted notorious "carder" websites. In 2006 eight people were
   arrested by Japanese police on suspicion of phishing fraud by creating
   bogus Yahoo Japan Web sites, netting themselves 100 million yen ($870
   thousand USD).

   In the United States, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the
   Anti-Phishing Act of 2005 on March 1, 2005. The federal anti-phishing
   bill proposes that criminals who create fake web sites and spam bogus
   emails in order to defraud consumers could receive a fine up to
   $250,000 and receive jail terms of up to five years.

   Microsoft has also joined the effort to crack down on phishing. On
   March 31, 2005, Microsoft filed 117 federal lawsuits in the U.S.
   District Court for the Western District of Washington. The lawsuits
   accuse " John Doe" defendants of using various methods to obtain
   passwords and confidential information. March 2005 also saw Microsoft
   partner with the Australian government to teach law enforcement
   officials how to combat various cyber crimes, including phishing..
   Microsoft announced a planned further 100 lawsuits outside the U.S. in
   March 2006

   AOL reinforced its efforts against phishing in early 2006 with three
   lawsuits seeking a total of $18 million USD under the 2005 amendments
   to the Virginia Computer Crimes Act.

   Retrieved from " http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing"
   This reference article is mainly selected from the English Wikipedia
   with only minor checks and changes (see www.wikipedia.org for details
   of authors and sources) and is available under the GNU Free
   Documentation License. See also our Disclaimer.
