USING WEB BUGS AND HONEYTOKENS TO INVESTIGATE THE SOURCE OF PHISHING ATTACKS

by McRae, Craig Michael

Phishing is the use of social engineering and electronic communications such as emails to try and illicit sensitive information such as usernames, passwords, and financial information. This form of identity theft has become a rampant problem in todays society. Phishing attacks have cost financial institutions millions of dollars per year and continue to do so. Todays defense against phishing attacks primarily consists of trying to take down the phishing web site as quickly as possible before it can claim too many victims. This thesis demonstrates that is possible to track down a phisher to the IP address of the phishers workstation rather than innocent machines used as intermediaries. By using web bugs and honeytokens on the fake web site forms the phisher presents, one can log accesses to the web bugs by the phisher when the attacker views the results of the forms.