Anti-phishing: refinement of the sitewatcher and unicode detection in firefox

Abstract

Phishing is a new type of computer criminal by using phishing email with spoofing contents to internet users intending to eager them to access phishing web sites and fill in their sensitive information like personal detail, bank account numbers, passwords, etc. The spoofing URLs and phishing web pages always have high visual similarities of layout and style. Unwary users may easily fall in the tricks. Phishing and spoofing attacks have been found increasing rapidly, much attention not only has been paid by computer societies, but also banking industries, news media and legislative entities. To protect user from phishing attacks, anti-phishing becomes one of the most important aspects in computer and Internet security. In this project, I will implement a program called SiteWatcher Toolbar and refine an anti-phishing software called SiteWatcher aiming to fight against phishing and spoofing attacks. SiteWatcher should be able to detect and alarm phishing attacks efficiently. New phishing web pages with high visual similarities of the legitimate web pages should also be detected by comparing and calculating the visual similarities of the pair of web pages. Moreover, SiteWatcher Toolbar is implemented for detecting and defending against various types of address spoofing attacks. Several techniques are investigated and implemented to fight against visually undistinguishable Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) spoofing attacks.