Scam Pandemic: How Attackers Exploit Public Fear through Phishing
Abstract
As the COVID-19 pandemic started triggering widespread lockdowns across the globe, cybercriminals did not hesitate to take advantage of users' increased usage of the Internet and their reliance on it. In this paper, we carry out a comprehensive measurement study of online social engineering attacks in the early months of the pandemic. By collecting, synthesizing, and analyzing DNS records, TLS certificates, phishing URLs, phishing website source code, phishing emails, web traffic to phishing websites, news articles, and government announcements, we track trends of phishing activity between January and May 2020 and seek to understand the key implications of the underlying trends. We find that phishing attack traffic in March and April 2020 skyrocketed up to 220\% of its pre-COVID-19 rate, far exceeding typical seasonal spikes. Attackers exploited victims' uncertainty and fear related to the pandemic through a variety of highly targeted scams, including emerging scam types against which current defenses are not sufficient as well as traditional phishing which outpaced the ecosystem's collective response.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2103.12843,
title = {Scam Pandemic: How Attackers Exploit Public Fear through Phishing},
author = {Marzieh Bitaab and Haehyun Cho and Adam Oest and Penghui Zhang and Zhibo Sun and Rana Pourmohamad and Doowon Kim and Tiffany Bao and Ruoyu Wang and Yan Shoshitaishvili and Adam Doupé and Gail-Joon Ahn},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2103.12843},
year = {2021}
}
Comments
10 pages, Accepted to eCrime 2020