Phishers, who trick online banking users into typing in their
details to fake sites, use tools in the process which have built-in
security holes for others to access the data that many do not have
the technical skills to spot, according to a security
researcher.
Nitesh Dhanjan will next week tell the Black Hat security
conference in Washington of the results of his and his colleague
Billy Rios's immersion in the world of phishers. He told OUT-LAW
Radio of his findings this week.
Dhanjani claims that most phishers are far from the technical
sophisticates of the popular imagination. Most, he said, use
pre-written phishing kits that take little skill to operate.
"What you see in [the kits] is ready made phishing sites," he
said. "All the research we've done is just basically what you can
do from a web browser without even crossing the line where it's
called hacking."
Dhanjani said that it was extremely easy to come across details
that had been stolen just hours previously. "Within 15 minutes of
starting this research we were staring at people's bank accounts
and credit card numbers and ATM PIN numbers posted on international
message boards," he said.
But the authors of the phishing kits are using more junior
phishers to do the work for them. Dhanjani said that when he and
Rios, who both work for un-named major corporations, looked at the
computer code in the kits, they found that it had two different
instructions commanding the system to email a victim's details.
"We realised that in the second mail command there was a hard
coded email address that the victim's information was also going
to," said Dhanjani. "So unbeknown to the phisher deploying this
kit, his information from the victim is going to him in addition to
the author who wrote this kit, so there you have a phisher phishing
a phisher."
Gartner estimated that phishing scams cost $3.2 billion in 2007,
and there are significant costs over and above the money lost
because it is often very difficult and time consuming for people to
prove that they were not responsible for spending in their
name.
Dhanjani said that there is no easy fix to the problem. He said
that until banks and governments have more sophisticated systems
than just simple credit card or government identity numbers the
problem will continue.
He said, though, that the cost of changing those systems was
greater than the sums currently being lost, meaning the systems are
unlikely to change soon.
