Grant: Idea to Innovation

Phishing is still currently one of the most impactful forms of attack delivered through electronic messages (i.e. emails, short messages, tweets). Targeted spearheaded phishing poses even more challenges as it relies on intimate knowledge of the victim gathered from online data dumps (e.g. in the dark web) or by hijacking online accounts. Recent high-profile hacking incidents have shown the limits of traditional anti-phishing solutions, such as spam filters and anti-virus systems. Those methods are heavily focused on analyzing the ""message"" and not the ""messenger"". As such it is easy to evade them by crafting the ""message"" to fit expected messaging standards (e.g. by removing spam idiosyncrasies and keywords, proof-reading the message, and using familiar terms and names). We have developed a new approach to protect against targeted spearheaded phishing attacks based on verifying the genuineness of the messenger's identity, and checking whether key message characteristics match the messaging behavior of the claimed messenger identity with respect to the recipient. The genuineness of the messenger's identity is established through stylometric authorship verification, which is known to be very challenging when dealing with short unstructured text. Messaging behavior is based on message origin location patterns (i.e. typical locations from where genuine messages were sent by this messenger), file attachment patterns (i.e. likelihood for the messenger to attach files of certain characteristics), and embedded URLs patterns (i.e. likelihood for the messenger to embed URLs). The proposed model is used to verify both incoming and outgoing messages. Checking outgoing messages allows determining whether a legitimate account has been hijacked and is being leveraged to send out phishing messages to victims known by the account owner. Checking incoming messages protects against phishing attacks by establishing whether the sender is genuine and known by the recipient. The goal of the proposed project is to further develop and extensively test a fully working prototype, in order to establish the commercial value of the technology in anticipation of transferring it to existing cybersecurity companies.*