True Request–Fake Response: A New Trend of Spear Phishing Attack

Abstract

Abstract: Phishing is a serious concern on internet. Current anti-phishing solutions identify scamming behaviour during one stage of communications between both users. They rely only on static features related to the attacker email on that stage to lure the potential victims. This paper exposes a new trend of spear-phishing attack, namely True Request–Fake Response (TR-FR), which exploits cross-communications among messaging clients as well as multi-stage interactions between the victim and the attacker. We propose theoretical approach and architecture based on email contextual parameters to identify such type of phishing. We identify a real case of TR-PR and apply the proposed method to show how this case can be detected.

Keywords: Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG), cross-communications, Phishing, spear phishing, True Request–Fake Response (TR-FR)

Cite this Article: Franklin Tchakounté, Virgile Simé Nyassi, Kalum Priyanath Udagepola. True Request–Fake Response: A New Trend of Spear Phishing Attack. Journal of Network Security. 2019; 7(3): 1-17p.