Phishing and Countermeasures Part 1 - A Comprehensive Resource
I've just started Phishing and Countermeasures: Understanding the Increasing Problem of Electronic Identity Theft edited by Markus Jakobsson and Steven Myers, and so far there is every indication it will be a solid resource. For starters, Jakobsson and Myers edit this 700-page tome with contributions from over 50 researchers in industry and academia. (So far the writing style is consistent, it doesn't feel like someone just append a bunch of material together from different authors). The book seems to cover the major areas of phishing and pharming, including information flow, spoofing, specialized attacks, like spear phishing and on-line shopping phishing, human factors and social engineering, and social networking.
One of the best aspects of the book so far is that so much information is available in one place and is quite well organized. If someone where just starting to learn about phishing, this would be an excellent place to start. The case studies and technical details will be appreciated by anyone already familiar with phishing.
The first four chapters introduce phishing, the flow of information in a phishing attack, spoofing and countermeasures, pharming, and client side attacks.
The first chapter is very basic and introduces what are by now well known characteristics of phishing scams plus a bit on the history of phishing. My favorite part was the case study on Fruggle phishing and the threats to on-line shopping.
The second chapter nicely categorizes types of phishing attacks based on the technology used, e.g. deceptive phishing, malware, DNS manipulation, content injection, man-in-the-middle attacks, and search engine phishing. It then describes countermeasures to each step in an attack. Again, these are well organized and someone not to familiar with phishing will pick up quite a bit of information in a 30 minute read.
Chapter 3 gets into various kinds of spoofing, including email, IP and Web spoofing.
Chapter 4 touches on malware but with only 15 pages dedicated to the topic, you can imagine how limited it is. That said, this is a book about phishing and they could easily spend half their 700 pages on malware, so the light review of malware is understandable. I would prefer to see more on keyloggers though. The chapter includes a case study on race-phishing (an attacker forces a victim's browser to visit a site controlled by the attacker rather than the site the victim intended).
I'm looking forward to the later chapters on human factors, social networks, authentication, and experiments conducted on phishing. I post on those as I get there.
Phishing and Countermeasures - Part 1 (introduction, attacks, countermeasures, pharming)
Phishing and Countermeasures - Part 2 (security tools and spear phishing)
Phishing and Countermeasures - Part 3 (human centered design,considerations, passwords, and mutual authentication)
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