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Dead Phish: An Examination of Deactivated Phishing Sites

Conference ·
OSTI ID:984774

Efforts to combat phishing and fraud online often center around filtering the phishing messages and disabling phishing Web sites to prevent users from being deceived. A couple approaches can be taken to disable a phishing site: 1) eliminate the required DNS records to reach the site or 2) remove the site from the machine itself. While previous work has focused on DNS take-down efforts, we focus on determining how long a phishing site remains on a machine after the DNS records have been removed. We find that on the day a site is reported, as many as 56% of phishing sites remain present on the hosting machines even after the DNS records have been removed. While many of these sites are removed within a few days, the DNS caching behavior at ISP resolvers may preserve the phishing site accessibility until the phishing site itself is completely removed.

Research Organization:
Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL); Center for Computational Sciences
Sponsoring Organization:
USDOE
DOE Contract Number:
AC05-00OR22725
OSTI ID:
984774
Country of Publication:
United States
Language:
English

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