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In computing, phishing is a criminal activity using social engineering techniques. Phishers attempt to fraudulently acquire sensitive information, such as passwords and credit card details, by masquerading as a trustworthy person or business in an electronic communication. Phishing is typically carried out using email or an instant message, although phone contact has been used as well<ref>Skoudis, Ed. "Phone phishing: The role of VoIP in phishing attacks", searchSecurity, June 13, 2006.</ref>. Attempts to deal with the growing number of reported phishing incidents include legislation, user training, and technical measures.

The first recorded mention of phishing is on the alt.online-service.america-online Usenet newsgroup on January 2, 1996,<ref>"phish, v." OED Online, March 2006, Oxford University Press.. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved on Aug 9, 2006.</ref> although the term may have appeared even earlier in the print edition of the hacker magazine 2600.<ref>Ollmann, Gunter. The Phishing Guide: Understanding and Preventing Phishing Attacks. Technical Info. Retrieved on Jul 10, 2006.</ref> The term phishing is a variant of fishing<ref>Spam Slayer: Do You Speak Spam?. PCWorld.com. Retrieved on Aug 16, 2006.</ref>, probably influenced by phreaking,<ref>"phishing, n." OED Online, March 2006, Oxford University Press.. Oxford English Dictionary Online. Retrieved on Aug 9, 2006.</ref><ref>Phishing. Language Log, September 22, 2004. Retrieved on Aug 9, 2006.</ref> and alludes to the use of increasingly sophisticated lures to "fish" for users' financial information and passwords. The word may also be linked to leetspeak, in which ph is a common substitution for f.<ref>Mitchell, Anthony. "A Leet Primer", TechNewsWorld, July 12, 2005.</ref> The popular theory that it is a portmanteau of password harvesting<ref>Know your Enemy: Phishing. The Honeynet Project & Research Alliance. Retrieved on Jul 8, 2006.</ref> is an example of folk etymology.

Contents 1 Early phishing on AOL 2 Recent phishing attempts 2.1 Phishing techniques 2.2 Phishing examples 3 Damage caused by phishing 4 Anti-phishing 4.1 Social responses 4.2 Technical responses 4.3 Monitoring and takedown 4.4 Legal responses 5 See also 6 References 7 External links

[edit] Early phishing on AOL

Those who would later phish on AOL during the 1990s originally used fake, algorithmically generated credit card numbers to create accounts on AOL, which could last weeks or even months. After AOL brought in measures in late 1995 to prevent this, early AOL crackers resorted to phishing for legitimate accounts.<ref>Phishing. Word Spy. Retrieved on Sep 28, 2006.</ref>

Phishing on AOL was closely associated with the warez community that exchanged pirated software. A phisher might pose as an AOL staff member and send an instant message to a potential victim, asking him to reveal his password.<ref>Stutz, Michael. "AOL: A Cracker's Paradise?", Wired News, January 29, 1998.</ref> In order to lure the victim into giving up sensitive information the message might include text such as "verify your account" or "confirm billing information". Once the victim had submitted his password, the attacker could access and use the victim's account for criminal purposes, such as spamming. Both phishing and warezing on AOL generally required custom-written programs, such as AOHell. Phishing became so prevalent on AOL that they added a line on all instant messages stating: "no one working at AOL will ask for your password or billing information".

After 1997, AOL's policy enforcement with respect to phishing and warez became stricter and forced pirated software off AOL servers. AOL simultaneously developed a system to promptly deactivate accounts involved in phishing, often before the victims could respond. The shutting down of the warez scene on AOL caused most phishers to leave the service, and many phishers — often young teens — grew out of the habit.<ref>History of AOL Warez. Retrieved on Sep 28, 2006.</ref>

[edit] Recent phishing attempts

More recent phishing attempts have targeted the customers of banks and online payment services. E-mails supposedly from the Internal Revenue Service have also been used to glean sensitive data from U.S. taxpayers.<ref>Suspicious e-Mails and Identity Theft. Internal Revenue Service. Retrieved on Jul 5, 2006.</ref> 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.<ref>"Phishing for Clues", Indiana University Bloomington, September 15, 2005.</ref>. Targeted versions of phishing have been termed spear phishing.<ref>What is spear phishing?. Microsoft Security At Home. Retrieved on Jul 10, 2006.</ref> Social networking sites are also a target of phishing, since the personal details in such sites can be used in identity theft.<ref>Kirk, Jeremy. "Phishing Scam Takes Aim at MySpace.com", IDG Network, June 02, 2006.</ref> Experiments show a success rate of over 70% for phishing attacks on social networks.<ref>Tom Jagatic and Nathan Johnson and Markus Jakobsson and Filippo Menczer. Social Phishing. To appear in the CACM. Retrieved on Jun 3, 2006.</ref>

[edit] Phishing techniques

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

One method of spoofing links use web addresses containing the @ symbol, which are used to include a username and password in a web URL (contrary to the standard<ref>Berners-Lee, Tim. Uniform Resource Locators (URL). IETF Network Working Group. Retrieved on January 28, 2006.</ref>). For example, the link http://www.google.com@members.tripod.com/ might deceive a casual observer into believing that the link will open a page on www.google.com, whereas the link actually directs the browser to a page on members.tripod.com, using a username of www.google.com; were there no such user, the page would open normally. Such URLs were subsequently disabled in Internet Explorer<ref>Microsoft. A security update is available that modifies the default behavior of Internet Explorer for handling user information in HTTP and in HTTPS URLs. Microsoft Knowledgebase. Retrieved on August 28, 2005.</ref>, with the Mozilla<ref>Fisher, Darin. Warn when HTTP URL auth information isn't necessary or when it's provided. Bugzilla. Retrieved on August 28, 2005.</ref> and Opera web browsers opting instead to present a warning message and give users the option of continuing to the site or cancelling.

Some phishing scams use JavaScript commands in order to alter the address bar. This is done either by placing a picture of the legitimate entity's URL over the address bar, or by closing the original address bar and opening a new one containing the legitimate URL.<ref>"Phishing con hijacks browser bar", BBC News, April 8, 2004.</ref>

In another popular method of phishing, an attacker uses a bank or service's own scripts against the victim.<ref>Krebs, Brian. Flaws in Financial Sites Aid Scammers. Security Fix. Retrieved on June 28, 2006.</ref> These types of attacks (known as cross-site scripting) are particularly problematic, because they direct the user to sign in at their bank or service's own web page, where everything from the web address to the security certificates appears correct. In reality, the link to the website is crafted to carry out the attack, although it is very difficult to spot without specialist knowledge. Just such a flaw was used in 2006 against PayPal.<ref>Mutton, Paul. PayPal Security Flaw allows Identity Theft. Netcraft. Retrieved on June 19, 2006.</ref>

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<ref>Johanson, Eric. The State of Homograph Attacks Rev1.1. The Shmoo Group. Retrieved on August 11, 2005.</ref> or a homograph attack,<ref>Evgeniy Gabrilovich and Alex Gontmakher (February 2002). "The Homograph Attack". Communications of the ACM 45(2): 128.</ref> no known phishing attacks have yet taken advantage of it.

Not all phishing attacks require a fake website. In an incident in 2006,<ref>Gonsalves, Antone. "Phishers Snare Victims With VoIP", Techweb, April 25, 2006.</ref> messages that claimed to be from a bank told users to dial a phone number regarding a problem with their bank account. Once the phone number was dialed, prompts told users to enter their account numbers and PIN. The number was provided by a Voice over IP provider.

[edit] Phishing examples

PayPal phishing example Image:Paypal Phishing.png

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

SouthTrust Bank example

In this second example, targeted at SouthTrust Bank users, the phisher has used an image to make it harder for anti-phishing filters to detect by scanning for text commonly used in phishing emails.<ref>Mutton, Paul. Fraudsters seek to make phishing sites undetectable by content filters. Netcraft. Retrieved on Jul 10, 2006.</ref>

From: SouthTrust <support_id_99583160@southtrust.com>

To: john.smith@example.com

Subject: SouthTrust Bank: Important Notification

Date: Thu, 16 Jun 2005 23:56:30 -0200 (22:56 BRT)

Image:Phishing-Email-Image-Bank.png

[edit] Damage caused by phishing

The damage caused by phishing ranges from loss of access to email to substantial financial loss. This style of identity theft is becoming more popular, because of the ease with which unsuspecting people often divulge personal information to phishers, including credit card numbers, social security numbers, and mothers' maiden names. There are also fears that identity thieves can obtain some such information simply by accessing public records.<ref>Virgil Griffith and Markus Jakobsson. Messin' with Texas, Deriving Mother's Maiden Names Using Public Records. ACNS '05. Retrieved on Jul 7, 2006.</ref>

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^{[citation needed]}.

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.<ref>Kerstein, Paul. "How Can We Stop Phishing and Pharming Scams?", CSO, July 19, 2005.</ref> In the United Kingdom losses from web banking fraud — mostly from phishing — almost doubled to £23.2m in 2005, from £12.2m in 2004,<ref>"UK phishing fraud losses double", Finextra, March 07, 2006.</ref> while 1 in 20 users claimed to have lost out to phishing in 2005.<ref>Richardson, Tim. "Brits fall prey to phishing", The Register, May 3, 2005.</ref>

[edit] Anti-phishing

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

[edit] Social responses

One strategy for combating phishing is to train users to deal with phishing attempts. User education can be promising, especially where training provides direct feedback to the user on his success (or otherwise). <ref>Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, Yong Woo Rhee, Alessandro Acquisti, Lorrie Cranor, Jason Hong and Elizabeth Nunge. (November 2006.). Protecting People from Phishing: The Design and Evaluation of an Embedded Training Email System.. Technical Report CMU-CyLab-06-017, CyLab, Carnegie Mellon University.. Retrieved on Nov 14, 2006.</ref> 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.<ref>Bank, David. "'Spear Phishing' Tests Educate People About Online Scams", The Wall Street Journal, August 17, 2005.</ref>

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.<ref>Anti-Phishing Tips You Should Not Follow. HexView. Retrieved on June 19, 2006.</ref>

Nearly all legitimate email messages from companies to their customers will contain an item of information that is not readily available to phishers. Some companies, like PayPal, always address their customers by their username in emails, so if an email addresses a user in a generic fashion ("Dear PayPal customer") it is likely to be an attempt at phishing.<ref>Protect Yourself from Fraudulent Emails. PayPal. Retrieved on July 07, 2006.</ref> Emails from banks and credit card companies will often include partial account numbers. Therefore, one should always be suspicious if the message does not contain specific personal information. Phishing attempts in early 2006, however, used such highly personalized information, making it unsafe to rely on personal information alone as a sign that a message is legitimate.<ref>Zeltser, Lenny. "Phishing Messages May Include Highly-Personalized Information", The SANS Institute, March 17, 2006.</ref> Further, another recent study concluded in part that the presence of this information does not significantly affect the success rate of phishing attacks,<ref>Markus Jakobsson and Jacob Ratkiewicz. Designing Ethical Phishing Experiments. WWW '06.</ref> suggesting that most users do not pay attention to such details anyway.

The Anti-Phishing Working Group, an industry and law enforcement association, has suggested that conventional phishing techniques could become obsolete in the future as people are increasingly aware of the social engineering techniques used by phishers.<ref>Kawamoto, Dawn. "Faced with a rise in so-called pharming and crimeware attacks, the Anti-Phishing Working Group will expand its charter to include these emerging threats.", ZDNet India, August 4, 2005.</ref> They propose that pharming and other uses of malware will become more common tools for stealing information.

[edit] 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<ref>Brandt, Andrew. Privacy Watch: Protect Yourself With an Antiphishing Toolbar. PC World - Privacy Watch. Retrieved on Sep 25, 2006.</ref>, or spot phishing attempts in email. Microsoft's new IE7 browser, Mozilla's Firefox 2, and Opera from version 9.1 will include a form of anti-phishing technology, by which a site may be checked against a list of known phishing sites. If the site is a suspect the software may either warn a user or block the site outright.<ref>Franco, Rob. Better Website Identification and Extended Validation Certificates in IE7 and Other Browsers. IEBlog. Retrieved on May 20, 2006.</ref><ref>Bon Echo Anti-Phishing. Mozilla. Retrieved on June 02, 2006.</ref> <ref>"Gone Phishing: Evaluating Anti-Phishing Tools for Windows", 3Sharp, September 27, 2006. Retrieved on October 20, 2006.</ref> Firefox 2 uses Google anti-phishing software, which may also be installed under IE6. Spam filters also help protect users from phishers, because they reduce the number of phishing-related emails that users receive. <ref>Ian Fette, Norman Sadeh, Anthony Tomasic (June 2006). Learning to Detect Phishing Emails. Carnegie Mellon University Technical Report CMU-ISRI-06-112.</ref> An approach introduced in mid-2006 (similar in principle to using a hosts file to block web adverts) involves switching to using a special DNS service that filters out known phishing domains, which will work with any browser.<ref> Higgins, Kelly Jackson. DNS Gets Anti-Phishing Hook. Dark Reading. Retrieved on October 8, 2006.</ref>

Security skins<ref> Schneier, Bruce. Security Skins. Schneier on Security. Retrieved on December 3, 2006.</ref> present a user-selected secret image whenever a password is requested; if the image does not appear, then the site is not legitimate. Bank of America use these together with challenge questions, which ask the user for information that should be known only to the user and the bank.<ref>Brubaker, Bill. "Bank of America Personalizes Cyber-Security", Washington Post, July 14, 2005.</ref> This feature (and other forms of two-way authentication and two-factor authentication) is still susceptible to attack, such as that suffered by Scandinavian bank Nordea in late 2005.<ref>"Phishers target Nordea's one-time password system", Finextra, 12/10/2005.</ref>

[edit] Monitoring and takedown

Several companies offer banks and other entities likely to suffer from phishing scams 24/7 services to monitor, analyze and assist in shutting down phishing websites.<ref>Anti-Phishing Working Group: Vendor Solutions. Anti-Phishing Working Group. Retrieved on July 06, 2006.</ref> Individuals can contribute by reporting phishing to both volunteer and industry groups,<ref>McMillan, Robert. "New sites let users find and report phishing", LinuxWorld, March 28, 2006.</ref> such as PhishTank.<ref>PhishTank - A New Collaborative Phishing Workgroup. limited-exposure. Retrieved on Oct 03, 2006.</ref>

[edit] Legal responses

On January 26, 2004, the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) filed the first lawsuit against a suspected phisher. The defendant, a Californian teenager, allegedly created and used a webpage designed to look like the America Online website, so that he could steal credit card numbers.<ref>Legon, Jeordan. "'Phishing' scams reel in your identity", CNN, January 26, 2004.</ref> Other countries have followed the lead of the U.S. by tracing and arresting phishers. A phishing kingpin, Valdir Paulo de Almeida, was arrested in Brazil for leading one of the largest phishing crime rings, which in 2 years stole between $18 and $37 million USD.<ref>Leyden, John. "Brazilian cops net 'phishing kingpin'", The Register, March 21, 2005.</ref> UK authorities jailed two men in June 2005 for their role in a phishing scam,<ref>Roberts, Paul. "UK Phishers Caught, Packed Away", eWEEK, June 27, 2005.</ref> in a case connected to the US Secret Service Operation Firewall, which targeted notorious "carder" websites.<ref>Nineteen Individuals Indicted in Internet 'Carding' Conspiracy. Retrieved on November 20, 2005.</ref> In 2006 eight people were arrested by Japanese police on suspicion of phishing fraud by creating bogus Yahoo Japan Web sites, netting themselves 100 million yen ($870 thousand USD).<ref>"8 held over suspected phishing fraud", The Daily Yomiuri, May 31, 2006.</ref>

In the United States, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy introduced the Anti-Phishing Act of 2005 on March 1, 2005. The federal anti-phishing bill proposes that criminals who create fake web sites and spam bogus emails in order to defraud consumers could receive a fine up to $250,000 and receive jail terms of up to five years.<ref>"Phishers Would Face 5 Years Under New Bill", Information Week, March 2, 2005.</ref>

Microsoft has also joined the effort to crack down on phishing. On March 31, 2005, Microsoft filed 117 federal lawsuits in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington. The lawsuits accuse "John Doe" defendants of using various methods to obtain passwords and confidential information. March 2005 also saw Microsoft partner with the Australian government to teach law enforcement officials how to combat various cyber crimes, including phishing.<ref>Microsoft Partners with Australian Law Enforcement Agencies to Combat Cyber Crime. Retrieved on August 24, 2005.</ref>. Microsoft announced a planned further 100 lawsuits outside the U.S. in March 2006<ref>Espiner, Tom. "Microsoft launches legal assault on phishers", ZDNet, March 20, 2006.</ref>

AOL reinforced its efforts against phishing<ref>Overview of AOL anti-phishing activities. Retrieved on March 08, 2006.</ref> in early 2006 with three lawsuits<ref>AOL Takes Fight Against Identity Theft To Court, Files Lawsuits Against Three Major Phishing Gangs. Retrieved on March 08, 2006.</ref> seeking a total of $18 million USD under the 2005 amendments to the Virginia Computer Crimes Act.<ref>HB 2471 Computer Crimes Act; changes in provisions, penalty.. Retrieved on March 08, 2006.</ref><ref>Brulliard, Karin. "Va. Lawmakers Aim to Hook Cyberscammers", Washington Post, April 10, 2005.</ref>

[edit] See also

• Anti-phishing software
• Computer insecurity
• Defensive computing
• E-mail spoofing
• Pharming
• Rock Phish Kit
• Social engineering
• Vishing

[edit] References

[edit] External links

• Anti-Phishing Working Group - News about phishing and anti-phishing control methods.
• Bank Safe Online - Advice to UK consumers regarding phishing.
• Banking Scam Revealed - A public forensic examination of a phishing attack.
• CIMIP - Center for Identity Management and Information Protection.
• Duke Law & Technology Review - Plugging the "phishing" hole: legislation versus technology.
• FBI E-scams and Warnings Update - Summaries of new or active scams that use the web or e-mail.
• FTC Consumer Alert - How not to get hooked by a phishing scam.
• How Phishing Actually Works - How the bad guys actually operate.
• Indiana University Phishing Group - Collection of research articles on phishing.
• Know Your Enemy: Phishing - Case study from the Honeynet Project on detailed techniques of a couple of phishers.
• Phishing Detection and Prevention: Practical Counter-Fraud Solutions - Industry whitepaper exploring various counter-fraud techniques.
• The Phishing Guide: Understanding and Preventing Phishing Attacks - The technologies and security flaws phishers exploit.
• Phishing IQ Test - Find out how well you can recognize a Phishing email.
• Phishing mailing list - Phishing discussion, research and mitigation.
• Phishing scams gallery - A large and growing gallery of phishing examples.
• Spot phishing scams - Recognize Phishing Scams.

This article is part of the Spamming series.
E-mail spam	DNSBL | Spamhaus | Stopping e-mail abuse | Spambot Address munging | E-mail authentication | Directory Harvest Attack
Spamdexing	Google bomb | Keyword stuffing | Cloaking | Link farm | Web ring Referer spam | Blog spam | Spam blogs | Sping | Scraper site
Telemarketing	Autodialer | Mobile phone spam | VoIP spam
Scams	Phishing | Advance fee fraud | Lottery scam | Make money fast | Pump and dump
Misc.	Messaging spam | Newsgroup spam | Flyposting History of spamming

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