Emerging phishing trends and effectiveness of the anti-phishing landing page

Each month, more attacks are launched with the aim of making web users believe that they are communicating with a trusted entity which compels them to share their personal, financial information. Acquired sensitive information is then used for personal benefits, like, gain access to money of the individuals from whom the information was taken. Phishing costs Internet users billions of dollars every year. A recent report highlighted phishing loss of around $448 million to organizations in April 2014. Researchers at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) created an anti-phishing landing page supported by Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) with the aim to train users on how to prevent themselves from phishing attacks. It is used by financial institutions, phish site take down vendors, government organizations, and online merchants. When a potential victim clicks on a phishing link that has been taken down, he / she is redirected to the landing page. In this paper, we present the comparative analysis on two datasets that we obtained from APWG's landing page log files; one, from September 7, 2008 - November 11, 2009, and other from January 1, 2014 - April 30, 2014. We found that the landing page has been successful in training users against phishing. Forty six percent users clicked lesser number of phishing URLs from January 2014 to April 2014 which shows that training from the landing page helped users not to fall for phishing attacks. Our analysis shows that phishers have started to modify their techniques by creating more legitimate looking URLs and buying large number of domains to increase their activity. We observed that phishers are exploiting Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) accredited registrars to launch their attacks even after strict surveillance. We saw that phishers are trying to exploit free subdomain registration services to carry out attacks. In this paper, we also compared the phishing e-mails used by phishers to lure victims in 2008 and 2014. We found that the phishing e-mails have changed considerably over time. Phishers have adopted new techniques like sending promotional e-mails and emotionally targeting users in clicking phishing URLs.