Phishing Website Detection & Target Identification October 30 th, 2015 Samuel Marchal*, Kalle Saari*, Nidhi Singh †, N.Asokan* *Aalto University - † Intel Security

2 Outline Phishing detection system –minimal training data, language-independence, scalability –high accuracy, fast, locally computable (comparable to state-of- the-art) Target identification mechanism –language-independence, fast –High accuracy (comparable to state-of-the-art)

3 Outline Phishing detection system –minimal training data, language-independence, scalability, –high accuracy, fast, locally computable (comparable to state-of- the-art) Target identification mechanism –language-independence, fast –High accuracy (comparable to state-of-the-art)

4 Phishing Website

5 Data Sources Starting URL Landing URL Redirection chain Logged links HTML source code: –Text –Title –HREF links –Copyright Screenshot …

6 Phisher’s Control & Constraints Phishers have different level of control and are placed under some constraints while building a webpage: Control: External loaded content (logged links) and external HREF links are not controlled by page owner. Constraints: Registered domain name part of URL cannot be freely defined: constrained by registration (DNS) policies.

7 Hypothesis By modeling control/constraints in a feature set we can improve identification of phishing webpages –Will have good generalizability and be language independent By analyzing terms used in controlled and constrained sources we can identify the target of a phish

8 URL Structure Protocol = https FQDN = RDN = amazon.co.uk mld = amazon FreeURL = {www, /ap/signin?_encoding=UTF8} protocol://[subdomains.]mld.ps[/path][?query] FreeURL FQDN RDNFreeURL

9 Data Sources Control & Constraints Control / Constraint separation: –RDNs are constrained in composition –FreeURL, text, title, etc. are not constrained –RDNs in redirection chain controlled (internal) by page owner –Others RDNs (HREFs and logged links) not controlled (external) Data sources separation: UnconstrainedConstrained Controlled Text Title Copyright Internal FreeURL Internal RDNs Uncontrolled External FreeURLExternal RDNs

10 Phishing Classification System Features extraction (212) from data sources: –URL features (106) –Term usage consistency (66) –Usage of starting and landing mld (22) –RDN usage (13) –Webpage content (5) Gradient Boosting classification: –Feature selection and weighting –Robustness to over-fitting (generalizability)

11 Classification Performance (language independence) Classifier Training: –4,531 English legitimate webpages –1,036 phishing webpages Assessment: –100,000 English legitimate webpages –10,000 French legitimate webpages –10,000 German legitimate webpages –10,000 Italian legitimate webpages –10,000 Portuguese legitimate webpages –10,000 Spanish legitimate webpages –1,216 phishing webpages

12 Classification Performance (language independence) ROC CurvePrecision vs. Recall 100,000 English legitimate / 1,216 phishs PrecisionRecallFP RateAUCAccuracy

13 Scalability

14 Outline Phishing detection system –minimal training data, language-independence, scalability, –high accuracy, fast, locally computable (comparable to state-of- the-art) Target identification mechanism –language-independence, fast –High accuracy (comparable to state-of-the-art)

15 Target identification Target identification: identify a set of terms represented the impersonated service and brand: keyterms Assumption: keyterms appear in several data sources Query search engine with top keyterms to identify: –If the website is legitimate (appearing in top search results) –The potential targets of the phishing website Intersect sets of terms extracted from different visible data sources (title, text, starting/landing URL, Copyright, HREF links)

16 Target Identification Performance 600 phishing webpages with identified target: –(unverified phishes listed by PhishTank; identification done manually) TargetsIdentifiedUnknownMissedSuccess rate Top % Top % Top % Complementarity with phishing detection: –53 mislabeled legitimate webpages ( FP rate) –39 identified as legitimate in target identification Reduction of FP rate to (0.01%)

17 Concluding Remarks Phishing website detection system: –Language independent –Scalable –Fast ( < 1 second per webpage) –Client-side implementable –> 99.9% accuracy with < 0.05% false positives Target identification system: –Fast –Success rate > 90% for 1 target / 97.3% for a set of target

18 Demo Pipeline with both systems in a chain –Classify unverified phishs from PhishTank –Identify target

Phishing Website Detection & Target Identification October 30 th, 2015 Samuel Marchal*, Kalle Saari*, Nidhi Singh †, N.Asokan* *Aalto University - † Intel Security