Friday, January 26, 2007

Clustering Phishing Attacks

Clustering a phishing attack to get an in-depth and complete view on the inner workings of a major phishing outbreak or a specific campaign only - that's just among the many other applications of the InternetPerils. Backed up with neat visualization features, taking a layered approach, thus, make it easier for analysts do their jobs faster, its capabilities are already scoring points in the information security industry :

"InternetPerils has discovered that those phishing servers cluster, and infest ISPs at the same locations for weeks or months. Here's an example of a phishing cluster in Germany, ever-changing yet persistent for four months, according to path data collected and processed by InternetPerils, using phishing server addresses from the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG) repository. The above animation demonstrates a persistent phishing cluster detected and analyzed by InternetPerils using server addresses from 20 dumps of the APWG repository, the earliest shown 17 May and the latest 20 September. This phishing cluster continues to persist after the dates depicted, and InternetPerils continues to track it."

Here are seven other interesting anti-phishing projects, and a hint to the ISPs who really want to know what their customers are (unknowingly) up to.

Visual Thesaurus on Security

In case you haven't heard of the Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus, it's an "interactive dictionary and thesaurus which creates word maps that blossom with meanings and branch to related words. Its innovative display encourages exploration and learning. You'll understand language in a powerful new way." With its current database size and outstanding usability build into the interface, it has a lot of potential for growth, and I'm sure you'll find out the same if you play with it for a little while.