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Security researchers show how to hook phishers

Sniffing out bad sushi

By John Leyden • Get more from this author

Posted in Software & Security, 19th March 2008 12:03 GMT

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Security researchers are cooking up tactics for beating phishing fraudsters at their own game.

Phishers perennially set up fraudulent sites on servers they have compromised. But due to the sheer volume of sites that need to be set up to perform a successful phishing expedition, fraudsters tend to be sloppy.

This allows those fighting phishers to easily identify compromised servers, which are easy to gain access to since fraudsters have already done the grunt work.

Once inside a compromised server, security researchers are able to follow a phisher's trail to find out what information they have extracted on prospective marks.

Nitesh Dhanjani, an application security specialist at management consultant Ernst and Young, and Billy Rios of Microsoft aim to outline how research on compromised servers can expose the tactics and tools used by phishers in a presentation at the Black Hat conference in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, next week.

A walk-through of how compromised hosts were accessed to gain information about phishers will be presented. The talk, entitled Bad Sushi will follow the trail of compromised information from phishing sites to underground message boards. ®

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