Re: Discovering and Stopping Phishing/Scam Attacks

I know of some financial institutions that have done this (for I
helped implement it) and it works quite well. They have proactively
shut down phishing sites while they were still in "test mode".

byte_jump

On 4/26/05, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
> As we have all noticed, there has increase in the number of phishing/scam
> attempts via e-mail that appear to be legitimate.  Most of
> these e-mails look identical to e-mails that would be sent by the
> e-commerce or banking institute.  They also frequently link to
> fraudulent/hacked webservers that also appear very similar to the website
> they are masquerading as.
> 
> I noticed quite some time ago is that most of these websites
> and e-mails do not host their own images.  From what I have seen, more
> often than not, these e-mails and websites link directly to images hosted
> by the legitimate website.  For example, I just received an eBay scam
> asking me to signup to be a PowerSeller.  The PowerSeller artwork, logos,
> and other images are all linked directly from eBay.  So this makes me
> realize that there are a few things some of these targeted
> websites/businesses can do to detect these scam sites much quicker.  I
> have made this suggestion to a few banking institutions in the past, and I
> have no idea if anyone has actually decided to implement my ideas or not
> -- but they seem pretty feasible.
> 
> Since they are linking to the images hosted on the site they are cloning
> -- the banking/e-commerce website could just rename their images on
> their own webpage every so often (and update their webpages accordingly).
> However, at the same time they should keep copies of the images with their
> old names.  Now they can check their logs to see what webpage(s) are
> accessing these old image names.  Chances are they will link directly back
> to the hacked website purporting to be their page.  This would allow for
> quicker detection of this phishing and scam websites, providing a slight
> leg up for sites trying to fight this.
> 
> Just an idea -- let me know if anyone has any comments.
> 
> Steven
> [email protected]
> 
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