Protecting Users against Phishing Attacks

Phishing is a form of online identity theft that aims to steal sensitive information such as online banking passwords and credit card information from users. Phishing scams have been receiving extensive press coverage because such attacks have been escalating in number and sophistication. According to a study by Gartner, 57 million US Internet users have identified the receipt of email linked to phishing scams and ∼2 million of them are estimated to have been tricked into giving away sensitive information. This paper presents a novel browser extension, AntiPhish, that aims to protect users against spoofed web site-based phishing attacks. To this end, AntiPhish tracks the sensitive information of a user and generates warnings whenever the user attempts to give away this information to a web site that is considered untrusted.