PhishTester: Automatic Testing of Phishing Attacks

Phishing is a web-based attack where users are allured to visit fake websites and provide their personal information. Traditional anti-phishing tools are successful to mitigate the attack partially. Most of the tools are focused on protecting users. However, there exists lack of efforts to help anti-phishing professionals who manually verify a reported phishing site and take further actions. Moreover, current tools cannot detect phishing attacks that leverage vulnerabilities in trusted web applications such as cross site scripting. An attacker might generate input forms by injecting script code and steal credentials. This paper attempts to address these issues by leveraging traditional web application testing method which can be seen as a complementary effort to current anti-phishing techniques. We consider a suspected website as a web application and test the application based on a behavior model. The model is described using the notion of Finite State Machine (FSM) that captures submission of forms with fake inputs and corresponding responses. We then identify several heuristic coverage criteria to detect inconsistencies which lead to the conclusion that a website is phishing or real. We implement a tool named Phish Tester to automate the testing process. We evaluate the proposed approach with both phishing and real applications. The initial results show that the approach incurs negligible false negatives (less than 3%) and zero false positive for detecting phishing and real websites, respectively. The approach can be complementary to current anti-phishing tools to discover advanced phishing attacks.