Phishing Kits: The New Frontier For Hackers

Uploaded on 2023-04-06 in TECHNOLOGY--Resilience, TECHNOLOGY--Hackers, FREE TO VIEW

Up until now, designing and implementing a successful phishing campaign required strong technical skills to go through all the phases in the lifecycle of an attack. Phishing pages typically needed to be a perfect copy of a spoofed or targeted page and modified to surreptitiously send sensitive data collected to the phisher.

This would ordinarily require specialist web development skills, limiting the number of people that could potentially step into the role of a phisher. Now, a new and more readily accessible form of 'off-the-shelf attack', the Phishing Kit, has been detected.

Specifically, a Phishing Kit consists of a collection of files that the hacker installs on a fake page that imitates, for example, a bank or Facebook, which already contains the code to collect credentials of users. These kits are sold to less skilled cyber criminals who then install them on the site they want to attack. This fraudulent system is dangerous, both because it allows inexperienced scammers to purchase access to complex code from a cyber criminal and because both criminal parties get access the victim's stolen data at the time of the attack.

Phishing attacks are becoming much more frequent and the availability of Phishing Kits is only likely to make things worse.

The leading Italian firm Ermes–Cybersecurity has analysed the phenomenon and discovered that, in the evolution of creating the Kits, attackers copy and paste pieces of code from other people's Kits, adapting them to their own needs.

According to Ermes, there are very few original kits, which makes it possible to identify entire clusters of related kits.

Analysis of this threat can lead to the identification of criminals, however, the kits are not generally recognisable by users, and special tools are needed to identify the source of the code being used. To combat these threats, Ermes has built a unique and proprietary dataset containing tens of thousands of phishing kits, which are continuously augmented by downloading phishing kits left by attackers on phishing sites that have been identified.

Ermes routinely leverages this valuable resource to conduct research and map newly discovered phishing sites to a phishing kit family for the purpose of providing customers with critical insights and intelligence. Ermes is now working on a white paper dedicated to Phishing kits, which will illuminate the problem and possible solutions in detail.

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