Phighting the Phisher: Using Web Bugs and Honeytokens to Investigate the Source of Phishing Attacks

This paper presents a summary of research findings for a new reacitve phishing investigative technique using Web bugs and honeytokens. Phishing has become a rampant problem in today ´s society and has cost financial institutions millions of dollars per year. Today´s reactive techniques against phishing usually involve methods that simply minimize the damage rather than attempting to actually track down a phisher. Our research objective is to track down a phisher to the IP address of the phisher´s workstation rather than innocent machines used as intermediaries. By using Web bugs and honeytokens on the fake Web site forms the phisher presents, one can log accesses to the honeytokens by the phisher when the attacker views the results of the forms. Research results to date are presented in this paper