Scam Pandemic: How Attackers Exploit Public Fear through Phishing

Autor:	Ruoyu Wang, Penghui Zhang, Haehyun Cho, Yan Shoshitaishvili, Adam Doupé, Marzieh Bitaab, Rana Pourmohamad, Zhibo Sun, Adam Oest, Gail-Joon Ahn, Tiffany Bao, Doowon Kim
Jazyk:	angličtina
Rok vydání:	2021
Předmět:	FOS: Computer and information sciences Government Computer Science - Cryptography and Security Exploit business.industry Internet privacy Phishing Market research Web traffic Pandemic Key (cryptography) The Internet business Cryptography and Security (cs.CR)
Zdroj:	eCrime
Popis:	As the COVID-19 pandemic started triggering widespread lockdowns across the globe, cybercriminals did not hesitate to take advantage of users' increased usage of the Internet and their reliance on it. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive measurement study of online social engineering attacks in the early months of the pandemic. By collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing DNS records, TLS certificates, phishing URLs, phishing website source code, phishing emails, web traffic to phishing websites, news articles, and government announcements, we track trends of phishing activity between January and May 2020 and seek to understand the key implications of the underlying trends. We find that phishing attack traffic in March and April 2020 skyrocketed up to 220\% of its pre-COVID-19 rate, far exceeding typical seasonal spikes. Attackers exploited victims' uncertainty and fear related to the pandemic through a variety of highly targeted scams, including emerging scam types against which current defenses are not sufficient as well as traditional phishing which outpaced the ecosystem's collective response. 10 pages, Accepted to eCrime 2020
Databáze:	OpenAIRE
Externí odkaz:	https://explore.openaire.eu/search/publication?articleId=doi_dedup___::0b197977c583dbd2f34e793b2f3335c0 http://arxiv.org/abs/2103.12843 Zobrazit plný text záznamu