Tools and techniques for improving cyber situational awareness of targeted phishing attacks

Legg, Phil; Blackman, Tim

Abstract

© 2019 IEEE. Phishing attacks continue to be one of the most common attack vectors used online today to deceive users, such that attackers can obtain unauthorised access or steal sensitive information. Phishing campaigns often vary in their level of sophistication, from mass distribution of generic content, such as delivery notifications, online purchase orders, and claims of winning the lottery, through to bespoke and highly-personalised messages that convincingly impersonate genuine communications (e.g., spearphishing attacks). There is a distinct trade-off here between the scale of an attack versus the effort required to curate content that is likely to convince an individual to carry out an action (typically, clicking a malicious hyperlink). In this short paper, we conduct a preliminary study on a recent realworld incident that strikes a balance between attacking at scale and personalised content. We adopt different visualisation tools and techniques for better assessing the scale and impact of the attack, that can be used both by security professionals to analyse the security incident, but could also be used to inform employees as a form of security awareness and training. We pitched the approach to IT professionals working in information security, who believe this may provide improved awareness of how targeted phishing campaigns can impact an organisation, and could contribute towards a pro-active step of how analysts will examine and mitigate the impact of future attacks across the organisation.

• Presentation Conference Type: Conference Paper (published)
• Conference Name: 2019 International Conference on Cyber Situational Awareness, Data Analytics and Assessment, Cyber SA 2019
• Start Date: Jun 3, 2019
• End Date: Jun 4, 2019
• Acceptance Date: Mar 26, 2019
• Online Publication Date: Jun 3, 2019
• Publication Date: Jun 1, 2019
• Deposit Date: Apr 9, 2019
• Publicly Available Date: Apr 9, 2019
• Publisher: Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• ISBN: 9781728102320
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1109/CyberSA.2019.8899406
• Keywords: cyber situational awareness, phishing, visualisation, user experience
• Public URL: https://uwe-repository.worktribe.com/output/846224
• Publisher URL: https://doi.org/10.1109/CyberSA.2019.8899406
• Contract Date: Apr 9, 2019