"Reminder: please update your details": Phishing Trends
Cynthia Dhinakaran, Jae Kwang lee, Dhinaharan Nagamalai

TL;DR
This study analyzes a large dataset of spam over a year to understand phishing tactics, revealing their social engineering focus and the need for adaptive anti-phishing strategies.
Contribution
It provides a detailed characterization of phishing scams and their evolving methods based on extensive real-world data collection.
Findings
Phishers rely more on social engineering than software vulnerabilities.
Phishing tactics are highly dynamic and adaptable.
The study offers insights for developing improved anti-phishing techniques.
Abstract
Spam messes up users inbox, consumes resources and spread attacks like DDoS, MiM, Phishing etc., Phishing is a byproduct of email and causes financial loss to users and loss of reputation to financial institutions. In this paper we study the characteristics of phishing and technology used by phishers. In order to counter anti phishing technology, phishers change their mode of operation; therefore continuous evaluation of phishing helps us to combat phishers effectively. We have collected seven hundred thousand spam from a corporate server for a period of 13 months from February 2008 to February 2009. From the collected date, we identified different kinds of phishing scams and mode of their operation. Our observation shows that phishers are dynamic and depend more on social engineering techniques rather than software vulnerabilities. We believe that this study would be useful to develop…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
