Phishing phishers and tracing their identities

Two fellow students of IT-Security at my university recently came up with an idea [paper] on catching phishers and tracing their identities. The idea is quite simple:

1.) collect some recent phishing sites, e.g. from Google or Microsoft
2.) create user credentials such as name, bank, account number, TANs etc. (e.g. from wordlists, dictionaries)
3.) send these special credentials (called ‘phoneytokens’) to the phishing sites

When the phisher[s] now visit the bank site and enter a phoneytoken, it is detected by the system and the phisher is being redirected to a honeypot system (called ‘phoneypot’) instead of the real banking application. This phoneypot looks like the real banking application and can collect data about the phisher, revealing organizational structures of the phishing system and hopefully the phisher himself.

Talks with German banks are currently in progress, let’s see how this will work in practice. I’ll keep you up to date.
If you have any input, you can write to the authors mentioned in the paper or to me, of course.

see you, cordney*

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current workspace

A nice saturday afternoon, sun is shining, 26°C outside and myself is working… ;)

current workspace

btw: if you know a working solution for the trac ticket spam problem, say having a barrier for spam robots to create and comment tickets, please let me know! Having the ticket section disabled although it could be really helpful in collecting bugs is not very amusing.

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Getting Windows XP [continued]

Yes, it’s true. I have to get Windows for developing purposes. One of my courses in the 4th semester require the AVR Studio IDE, which requires Windows XP. In “Embedded Processors” we are going to program an Atmel microcontroller to play the well known song “Frere Jacque”.

Luckily my university takes part in the MSDNAA developer program which gives you free access to operating systems, IDEs and other stuff from Microsoft. So here we go: Drop by at the office with a study attestation and get your login data. Then simply download the iso and burn it. “What, a 404kB exe file? What the hell?” Yes, they have their own installer, really! So what do you do with an exe file if you don’t own Windows? Fire up Darwine! Thanks to Mike, who builds Darwine snapshots regularly and offers them for download I now have the installer working and downloading a mysterious de_win_xp_pro_w_sp2.sdc file. “What the hell is sdc?” Next step in the installer is extracting the file, so let’s see if we get a burnable iso for BootCamp.

To be continued…

[continue]
Coming home from buying food I found my MacBook at full fan speed telling me that the start volume is full. Great! And WinHelper crashed. Even greater! But the installer is still open and tells me to click to install the product. So let’s see if we have an iso now.

Terminal showing directory with iso

Yey! An iso file! :) What a heck to just get Windows, no mentioning of installing and RUNNING it! Yak!
[/continue]

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Why I sometimes love Objective-C

[thisPC setObject:[[NSMutableString alloc] initWithString:[NSString stringWithFormat:@"-m 256 -net nic -net user -cdrom %@ -boot d -localtime", (additionalHardwarePath) ? additionalHardwarePath : [NSString stringWithString:@"/dev/cdrom"]]] forKey:@”Arguments”];

;)

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samplecode: [Cocoa] Fullscreen Toolbar

This is the Fullscreen Toolbar I have written for Q. The version for Q is slightly modified to work with the host-cocoa part [see in svn: http://www.kju-app.org/proj/browser/trunk/host-cocoa/FSControls].

This code is public domain. Feel free to use, modify and redistribute it.

Download XCode Project

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