Behind Identity Theft and Fraud in Cyberspace: The Current Landscape of Phishing Vectors
Thomas Nagunwa, The Society of Digital Information and Wireless Communication · International Journal of Cyber-Security and Digital Forensics · 2014
Increased consumer anti-phishing awareness and improved anti-spam technologies has gradually reduced the impact of traditional phishing spams in recent years. To keep up their game in a multi-billion dollar cybercrime industry, hackers have been continuously innovative in developing polymorphic phishing vectors. Spear phishing, malware, search engines poisoning, use of rogue Secure Socket Layer (SSL) certificates, mobile and social media attacks are among the modern and prominent vectors for phishing attacks today. This paper examines today’s most adopted phishing vectors by cybercriminals as observed by security vendors, security analysts and anti-phishing campaigners. Learning the current landscape of these vectors is a key step in developing effective technological, social and legal devices to mitigate the impacts of these threats across the globe. The paper concludes that almost of all today’s phishing attacks begin with spear phishing. Phishers focus more their attacks towards small and medium enterprises. Malware toolkits are the key player in all major attacks. Mobile and social media attacks have rapidly grown recently and promise to be the future of phishing.