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Catching Phishers by Their Bait: Investigating the Dutch Phishing

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Catching Phishers by Their Bait: Investigating the Dutch Phishing Catching Phishers By Their Bait: Investigating the Dutch Phishing Landscape through Phishing Kit Detection Hugo Bijmans, Tim Booij, and Anneke Schwedersky, Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO); Aria Nedgabat, Eindhoven University of Technology; Rolf van Wegberg, Delft University of Technology https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity21/presentation/bijmans This paper is included in the Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium. August 11–13, 2021 978-1-939133-24-3 Open access to the Proceedings of the 30th USENIX Security Symposium is sponsored by USENIX. Catching Phishers By Their Bait: Investigating the Dutch Phishing Landscape through Phishing Kit Detection Hugo Bijmans1, Tim Booij1, Anneke Schwedersky1, Aria Nedgabat2, and Rolf van Wegberg3 1Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research (TNO) 2Eindhoven University of Technology 3Delft University of Technology Abstract exfiltrated either through e-mail [47] or collected within an administrator panel. As phishing attacks are often tailored to a Off-the-shelf, easy-to-deploy phishing kits are believed to specific audience and country [44], understanding the impact lower the threshold for criminal entrepreneurs going phishing. of phishing kits on the entire landscape, should be investigated That is, the practice of harvesting user credentials by tricking per linguistic or geographical area to create coherent insights victims into disclosing these on fraudulent websites. But, how on phishing tactics, techniques and procedures (TTP). This do these kits impact the phishing landscape? And, how often specific focus aligns with earlier work finding that deployed are they used? We leverage the use of TLS certificates by phishing kits often victimize a particular audience and target phishers to uncover possible Dutch phishing domains aimed banks in a single country [17]. at the financial sector between September 2020 and January 2021. We collect 70 different Dutch phishing kits in the un- Given our information position in the Dutch cybercrime derground economy, and identify 10 distinct kit families. We ecosystem, enabling us to capture the supply of phishing kits, create unique fingerprints of these kits to measure their preva- we take phishing targeted at the Dutch financial sector as the lence in the wild. With this novel method, we identify 1,363 focus of our research. The Dutch retail banking sector is very Dutch phishing domains that deploy these phishing kits, and concentrated, as just three large retail banks and a few smaller capture their end-to-end life cycle – from domain registration, ones make up the entire market [2]. More importantly, they all kit deployment, to take-down. We find the median uptime of primarily service customers through online banking, which is phishing domains to be just 24 hours, indicating that phishers therefore widespread and popular in The Netherlands [51]. do act fast. Our analysis of the deployed phishing kits reveals Where executing a phishing attack has become quite sim- that only a small number of different kits are in use. We dis- ple, responding swiftly and adequately to this phenomenon is cover that phishers increase their luring capabilities by using far from trivial. By the time phishing domains are reported decoy pages to trick victims into disclosing their credentials. to law enforcement agencies (LEA), many of them are al- In this paper, we paint a comprehensive picture of the tac- ready offline. They can be either taken down by the phishers tics, techniques and procedures (TTP) prevalent in the Dutch themselves or by hosting providers, often initiated by notice- phishing landscape and present public policy takeaways for and-takedown requests by banks who’s clients get phished. anti-phishing initiatives. All of this makes phishing campaign attribution rather diffi- cult, as the window wherein evidence can be collected closes fast. To overcome this challenge, it is essential to pro-actively 1 Introduction detect phishing domains and get a minute-to-minute overview of the phishing landscape. Measuring the scale and operations Phishing is a pervasive type of social engineering that harvests is crucial for defining robust countermeasures and deploying user credentials by tricking targets into disclosing personal or them before these attacks can cause any harm. Additionally, financial information – e.g., credit card details – on a fraudu- the recent adoption of SMS and WhatsApp as a means of lent website. Deploying a phishing website has become trivial phishing message delivery [37] has sped up the execution with so-called ‘phishing kits’, which can be bought, leased of these attacks even more. Therefore, decreasing the time or even downloaded for free in the underground economy – between the start of the attack and detection – before the ar- like dark net markets [34], social media platforms or secure rival of the first victim – is crucial. In this paper, we present a messaging services like Telegram [29]. A phishing kit con- novel, multi-stage method to detect phishing domains at scale tains full-fledged phishing websites [9], mimicking popular in real time, capture their attributes and identify the presence banks or financial service providers. Phished credentials are of phishing kits. USENIX Association 30th USENIX Security Symposium 3757 We leverage the fact that many phishing domains are secured end-to-end life cycle of a typical phishing campaign. We end by TLS connections [16] and that newly issued X.509 certifi- this section with the scope of our work before we elaborate cates can be monitored in real time by observing Certificate on our measurement methodology. Transparency Logs [19]. By continuously monitoring these logs for ‘phishy’ domains and subsequently crawling them, 2.1 Luring in victims we create a dataset of potential malignant domains. By fin- gerprinting parts of the source code and structure of gathered The chances of successfully executing a phishing attack are phishing kits, we measure their prevalence in the wild by de- highly dependent on the credibility of the phishing message – tecting these fingerprints on live phishing domains. We group the bait. Therefore, phishers use a wide range of techniques related kits into families, analyze their deployments and gain and narratives to craft sophisticated phishing messages to more insights into the TTP used by these phishers. trick victims into disclosing their credentials without thinking Our analyses aims to create an overview of the impact twice. We can analyze such techniques by utilizing the work of off-the-shelf kits on the Dutch phishing landscape and to of Robert Caldini, the author of The Psychology of Persuasion, identify commonly used TTP. In this paper, we make the who identified several principles that explain how ‘mental following contributions: shortcuts’ can be exploited for the persuasion of others [8]. Recent work by Van der Heijden & Allodi [49] employed • We present the first empirical, longitudinal measurement Caldini’s principles on phishing e-mails and have shown that study of the end-to-end life cycle of Dutch phishing scarcity – time is limited, so the victim should act quickly – campaigns. and consistency – victim is already a customer of this bank, so communication is expected – are the most popular persuasion • We collect 70 different Dutch phishing kits, identify 10 techniques among phishers. different families and create unique fingerprints in order Although the contents of e-mails or text messages are un- to examine the prevalence of these kits in the wild. known when analyzing phishing websites, we were able to • We leverage the use of TLS certificates by phishers and identify these two principles on pages included in the various Certificate Transparency Logs to find 1,363 confirmed phishing kits we examine in Section4, as persuasion tech- Dutch phishing domains deploying these kits between niques are exemplified there. Like a request to pay additional September 2020 and January 2021. shipping costs for postal packages (scarcity), an identification request for DigiD – the Dutch online identity to interact with • We compile a comprehensive overview of the Dutch governmental organizations (consistency) – or a request to phishing landscape including commonly used (decoy) return debit cards to the bank for safe destruction and renewal tactics, phishing kit characteristics and preferred hosting (both scarcity and consistency). We noticed that besides the providers. traditional approach of demanding victims to login to their online banking account directly, attackers also deployed more The remainder of this paper is structured as follows: We ana- subtle, multi-staged, approaches. The first two examples are lyze the anatomy of a phishing campaign in Section2, explain part of such an approach phishers follow to improve the cred- our methodology in Section3 and present our results in the ibility of their attack. In such a staged approach, victims are subsequent sections. In Section4, we discuss the results of directed towards a decoy page like one of the aforementioned our analysis on gathered phishing kits. In Section5, we ex- examples first, as shown schematically in Figure1. There are amine the domains used by phishers and show how phishing no user credentials harvested on this page, but the victim is kits are deployed in Section6. We benchmark and validate directed to a page on which a variety of banks can be chosen our methodology with external data in Section7 and depict to initiate further steps eventually. As the victim is already the end-to-end life cycle of phishing campaigns with an ex- on a ‘trusted’ website, it is likely to be less observant. Any ample in Section8. An overview of related work on phishing irregularities are unlikely to be spotted, making disclosing measurements and phishing kit analysis is given in Section9. credentials to one of the fake bank login pages deployed by Finally, we critically discuss our results and methods in Sec- phishers the final step of the fall trap. Phishing kits employing tion 10, share our public policy takeaways and conclude our these techniques and containing templates for multiple banks work in Section 11.
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