Phishing Phishers - Observing and Tracing Organized Cybercrime

We investigate the paradigm shift from the real- world organized crime to the organized cyber crime, in particular with regard to identity theft through phishing and the methods deployed for the purpose of money laundering. Our work is based on our collaboration with banks and lawyers within the working group identity protection on the Internet (a-i3') as well as phishing victims in Germany. We report on case studies and analyze strategies used by phishers. We propose a forensic framework concept for identifying and tracing financial agents involved in the associated criminal network. Finally, we shortly discuss some open problems.