What is Phishing or Spoofing?

All About Phishing

by  Webopedia.com

Definition of Phishing

 

It is becoming increasingly common to tune in to the news or load your favorite news Web site and read about yet another Internet e-mail scam.
An e-mail scam is a fraudulent e-mail that appears to be from a legitimate Internet address with a justifiable request - usually to verify your personal information or account details.
One example would be if you received an e-mail that appears to be from your bank requesting you click a hyperlink in the e-mail and verify your online banking information.
Usually there will be a repercussion stated in the e-mail for not following the link, such as "your account will be closed or suspended".
The goal of the sender is for you to disclose personal and (or) account related information.
This type of e-mail scam is also called phishing.

PHISHING

(fish´ing) (n.) The act of sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. The e-mail directs the user to visit a Web site where they are asked to update personal information, such as passwords and credit card, social security, and bank account numbers, that the legitimate organization already has. The Web site, however, is bogus and set up only to steal the user's information.

How to Spot A Phishing Scam

At first glance, it may not be obvious to the recipients that what is in their inbox is not a legitimate e-mail from a company with whom they do business. The "From" field of the e-mail may have the .com address of the company mentioned in the e-mail, and the clickable link may also appear to be taking you to the company's Web site, but will in fact take you to a spoof Web site. Looks can be deceiving, but with phishing scams the e-mail is never from who is appears to be!

Phishing e-mails will contain some of these common elements:

1. The "From Field" appears to be from the legitimate company mentioned in the e-mail. It is important to note, however, that it is very simple to change the "from" information in any e-mail client. While we're not going to tell you how, rest assured it can be done in a matter of seconds!

2. The e-mail will usually contain logos or images that have been taken from the Web site of the company mentioned in the scam e-mail.

3. The e-mail will contain a clickable link with text suggesting you use the inserted link to validate your information. In the image you will see that once the hyperlink is highlighted, the bottom left of the screen shows the real Web site address to which you will go. Note that the hyperlink does NOT point to the legitimate Citibank Web site URL.

In this instance, the text you click is "here", However, this may also state something like "Log-in to Citibank" or "www.citibank.com/secure" to be even more misleading. This clickable area is only text and can be changed to anything the sender wants it to read.

Additionally, you may spot some of these elements that did not appear in this particular scam:

Logos that are not an exact match to the company's logo, spelling errors, percentage signs followed by numbers or @ signs within the hyperlink, random names or e-mail addresses in the body of the text, or even e-mail headers which have nothing to do with the company mentioned in the e-mail.

Who Is Behind the Phishes & Why

The people behind phishing e-mails are scam artists. They literally send out millions of these scam e-mails in the hopes that even a few recipients will act on them and provide their personal and financial information. Anyone with an e-mail address is at risk of being phished. Any e-mail address that has been made public on the Internet (posting in forums, newsgroups or on a Web site) is more susceptible to phishing as the e-mail address can be saved by spiders that search the Internet and grab as many e-mail addresses as they can. This is why phishing is profitable for scammers; they can cheaply and easily access millions of valid e-mail addresses to send these scams to. Common (Phish) Sense


After reading this far, we hope that you will be able to spot a phishing e-mail without too much difficulty. The e-mail represented above is just a sample; phishing e-mails can appear to be from any bank, PayPal, eBay, credit card companies, an online retail store - basically from anywhere a person may have registered for an account, and usually would have supplied financial information when registering.


The golden rule to avoid being phished is to   never ever click the links within the text of the e-mail.   Always delete the e-mail immediately. Once you have deleted the e-mail then empty the trash box in your e-mail client as well. This will prevent "accidental" clicks from happening as well. If, for some really odd reason you have this nagging feeling that this could just possibly be a legitimate e-mail and nothing can convince you otherwise, you still need to adhere to the golden rule and not click the link in the message. For those truly worried that an account may be in jeopardy if you do not verify your information, you need to open your Web browser program of choice and type the URL to the Web site in the address field of your browser and log on to the Web site as you normally would (without going through the e-mail link as a quick route). This will provide you with accurate information about your account and allow you to completely avoid the possibility of landing on a spoof Web site and giving your information to someone you shouldn't.


Now that you know how to avoid being phished, there is still the question of what to do about phishing e-mails should you be a recipient of them. First of all, you can visit the Web site of the company from whom the e-mail appears to be from and take the time to notify them of the suspicious e-mail. Many companies do want to know if their company name is being used to try and scam people, and you'll find scam and spoof reporting links within some of these Web sites. Additionally, you can report phishing to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC), and depending on where you live, some local authorities may also accept Internet phishing scam reports. Lastly, you can also send details of a phishing scam to to the Anti-Phishing Working Group who is building a repository/database of common scams to help inform people of the risks.

The New Phish - Spear Phishing

As with all malicious code, once a small percentage of the population starts to catch on, the perpetrators find ways to make the attack a little different, and this case, make the phish harder to net. The newest type of phishing scam is one that focuses on a single user or a department within an organization. The Phish appears to be legitimately addressed from someone within that company, in a position of trust, and request information such as login IDs and passwords. Spear phishing scams will often appear to be from a company's own human resources or technical support divisions and may ask employees to update their username and passwords. Once hackers get this data they can gain entry into secured networks. Another type of spear phishing attack will ask users to click on a link, which deploys spyware that can steal data.

Did You Know...

The word phishing comes from the analogy that Internet scammers are using e-mail lures to fish for passwords and financial data from the sea of Internet users. The term was coined in 1996 by hackers who were stealing AOL Internet accounts by scamming passwords from unsuspecting AOL users. Since hackers have a tendency to replacing "f" with "ph" the term phishing was derived.

History of phishing

The first recorded mention of phishing is on the alt.2600 hacker
newsgroup in January 1996, although the term may have appeared even earlier in the printed edition of the hacker newsletter "2600 Magazine". The term phishing was coined by crackers attempting to "fish" for accounts from unsuspecting AOL members; ph is a common hacker replacement for f, and is an imitation of an older form of hacking known as "phone   phreaking."

Early phishing on AOL

Those who would later phish on AOL during the 1990s originally created accounts on AOL with fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers - these accounts could last weeks or even months until new ones were required. Because AOL eventually brought in measures in late 1995 to prevent this, early AOL crackers resorted to phishing for legitimate AOL accounts.

Phishing on AOL was closely associated with the warez community that exchanged pirated software. A cracker might pose as an AOL staff member and send an instant message to a potential victim, asking the victim to reveal his or her password cracks[1]. In order to lure the victim into giving up sensitive information the message might include text such as "verify your account" or "confirm billing information". Once the victim had submitted his or her password, the attacker could then access the victim's account and use it for various criminal purposes, such as spamming. Both phishing and warezing on AOL generally required custom-written  programs, such as the colorfully named AOHell.

In 1997, AOL's policy enforcement with respect to phishing and warez became stricter and forced pirated software off AOL servers. Around the same time phishing was so prevalent on AOL that they added a line on all instant messages stating: "no one working at AOL will ask for your password or billing information". AOL simultaneously developed a system to quickly deactivate any account involved in phishing, often before their phishes (a term for the victims of a "phish") could respond. Phishers temporarily moved to AOL Instant Messenger (AIM), since they could not be banned from the AIM server. The shutting down of the warez scene on AOL caused most phishers to leave the service, and many phishers - often young teens in their heyday - grew out of the habit.

Recent phishing attempts

More recent phishing attempts have started to target the customers of banks and online payment services. While the first such examples were sent indiscriminately in the hope of finding a customer of a given bank or service, recent research has shown that phishers may in principle be able to establish what bank a potential victim has a relationship with, and then send an appropriate spoofed email to this victim [2]. (A variation is sending a pop-up on the legitimate bank's website asking for information.) E-mails supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service have also been used to glean sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers. As of March 2006 they had been identified as coming from 18 countries. In general such targeted versions of phishing have been termed spear phishing.

Phishing examples

PayPal phishing example

An example of a phishing email targeted at PayPal users.

In an example PayPal phish (right), spelling mistakes in the email ("no choise but to temporaly suspend your account"), and the presence of an IP address in the link visible in the tooltip under the yellow box ("Click here to verify your account") are both clues that this is a phishing attempt. Another giveaway, as mentioned elsewhere in this article, is the lack of a personalized greeting. "Dear Customer" or some such indicates a mass mailing, though a personal greeting is not a guarantee of legitimacy either.

SouthTrust Bank example

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

From: SouthTrust
To: xxxxxx@yyyyy.com.br
Subject: SouthTrust Bank: Important Notification
Date: 16th April 2006 23:56:30 -0200 (22:56 BRT)


Click here to see the image

An image from a phish targeted at SouthTrust bank customers.
In the third example, targeted at Chase Bank customers, the phisher spoofed the sender address to make it look like Chase Bank sent the mail. The tooltip over the link reveals that the e-mail in fact links to "account-chase.com" instead of "chase.com".

eBay example

The fourth example, targeted at eBay customers, links to a false PayPal website.

Phishing techniques

Most methods of phishing use some form of technical deception designed to make a link in an email appear to belong to the spoofed organization. Misspelled URLs or the use of subdomains are common tricks used by phishers, such as this example URL, http://www.yourbank.com.example.com/. One method of spoofing links used web addresses containing the @ symbol, which were used to include a username and password in a web URL (contrary to the standard [3]).

For example, the link http://www.google.com@members.tripod.com/ might deceive a casual observer into believing that the link will open a page on www.google.com, whereas the link actually directs the browser to a page on members.tripod.com, using a username of www.google.com; were there no such user, the page would open normally. This method has since been closed off in the Mozilla [4] and Internet Explorer  [5] web browsers, while Opera provides a warning message and the option not to follow the link.

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

In another popular method of phishing, an attacker uses a bank or service's own scripts against the victim. These types of attacks (known as Cross Site Scripting) are particularly problematic, because they direct the user to sign in at their bank or service's own web page, where everything from the web address to the security certificatesappears correct. In reality, the link to the website is crafted to carry out the attack, although it is very difficult to spot without specialist knowledge.


A further problem with URLs has been found in the handling of Internationalized domain names (IDN) in web browsers, that might allow visually identical web addresses to lead to different, possibly malicious, websites. Despite the publicity surrounding the flaw, known as IDN spoofing  [6] or a homograph attack  [7], no known phishing attacks have yet taken advantage of it.

Damage caused by phishing

Click here to see the image

A chart showing the increase in phishing reports from October 2004 to June 2005. The damage caused by phishing ranges from loss of access to email to substantial financial loss. This style of identity theft is becoming more popular, because of the ease with which unsuspecting people often divulge personal information to phishers, including credit card numbers and social security numbers. Once this information is acquired, the phishers may use a person's details to create fake accounts in a victim's name, ruin a victim's credit, or even prevent victims from accessing their own accounts.

It is estimated that between May 2004 and May 2005, approximately 1.2 million computer users in the United States suffered losses caused by phishing, totaling approximately $929 million USD. U.S. businesses lose an estimated $2 billion USD a year as their clients become victims.[8] The United Kingdom also suffers from the immense increase in phishing. In March 2005, the amount of money lost in the UK was approximately £12 million GBP.  [9]

Anti-phishing

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

Social responses

One strategy for combating phishing is to train users to deal with phishing attempts. One newer phishing tactic, which uses phishing emails targeted at a specific company, known as spear phishing, has been harnessed to train users at various locations, including West Point Military Academy. In a June 2004 experiment with spear phishing, 80% of 500 West Point cadets who were sent a fake email were tricked into revealing personal information. [10]

Users who are contacted about an account needing to be "verified" can take steps to avoid phishing attempts, by contacting the company that is the subject of the email to check that the email is legitimate, or by typing in a trusted web address for the company's website into the address bar of their browser, to bypass the link in the suspected phishing message. Many companies, including eBay and PayPal, always address their customers by their username in emails, so if an email addresses a user in a generic fashion ("Dear valued eBay member") it is likely to be an attempt at phishing.

Technical responses

Anti-phishing software is available that may identify phishing contents on websites, act as a toolbar that displays the real domain name for the visited website, or spot phishing attempts in email. Spam filters also help protect users from phishers, because they reduce the number of phishing-related emails that users receive.

Many organizations have introduced a feature called challenge questions, which ask the user for information that should be known only to the user and the bank. Sites have also added verification tools that allow users to see a secret image that the user selected in advance; if the image does not appear, then the site is not legitimate [11].

This (and other forms of two-way authentication and two-factor authentication) are still susceptible to attack, such as that suffered by Scandinavian bank Nordea in late 2005 [12].

Several companies offer banks and other entities likely to suffer from phishing scams 24/7 services to monitor, analyze and assist in shutting down phishing websites.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry and law enforcement association, has suggested that conventional phishing techniques could become obsolete in the future as people are increasingly aware of the social engineering techniques used by phishers. [13] They propose that pharming and other uses of malware will become more common tools for stealing information.

Legislative and judicial responses

On January 26, 2004, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) filed the first lawsuit against a suspected phisher. The defendant, a Californian teenager, allegedly created and used a webpage designed to look like the America Online website, so that he could steal credit card numbers [14]. Europe and Brazil have both followed the lead of the U.S. by tracing and arresting phishers.


In late March 2005, a 24-year-old Estonian man was arrested for using a backdoor, installed after victims visited his fake website, which included a keylogger that allowed him to monitor users' typing [15]. Likewise, authorities later arrested a phishing kingpin, Valdir Paulo de Almeida, for leading one of the largest phishing crime rings, which in 2 years stole between $18 and $37 million USD [16]. UK authorities jailed two men in June 2005 for their role in a phishing scam [17], in a case connected to the USSS Operation Firewall, which targeted notorious "carder" websites [18].


In the United States, Democrat  Senator  Patrick Leahy introduced the Anti-Phishing Act of 2005  on March 1, 2005.


The federal anti-phishing bill proposes that criminals who create fake web sites and spam bogus emails in order to defraud consumers could receive a fine up to $250,000 and receive jail terms of up to five years.[19] Microsoft has also joined the effort to crack down on phishing. On March 31, 2005, Microsoft filed 117 federal lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The lawsuits accuse "John Doe" defendants of using various methods to obtain passwords and confidential information. Microsoft hopes to use these lawsuits to uncover some of the largest phishing operators.

March 2005 also saw Microsoft partner with the Australian government to teach law enforcement officials how to combat various cyber crimes, including phishing.[20] AOL reinforced its efforts against phishing [21] in early 2006 with three lawsuits [22] seeking a total of $18 million USD under the 2005 amendments to the Virginia Computer Crimes Act [23]  [24].

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