Both Nitesh and Billy are well-known security researchers that have recently managed to infiltrate the phishing underground. What started as a simple examination of phishing sites, turned into an extraordinary view of the ecosystem that supports the phishing effort that plagues modern day financial institutions and their customers.

They saw an extraordinary amount of sensitive customer account information, obtained the latest phishing kits, located and examined the tools used by phishers, trolled sites buying and selling identities, and even social engineered a few scammers.

In this interview, they expose the tactics and tools that phishers use, illustrate what happens when your confidential information gets stolen, discuss how phishers communicate and even how they phish each other.


What are phishing kits and how are they distributed?

Dhanjani: A phishing kit is the most important tool in a phisher's arsenal. Think of a popular company that executes financial transactions on the web. All the source code and static content such as images and logos needed to setup a phishing site for the company you just thought of is most likely to be present in a phishing kit. Let us suppose you get hold of such a kit and you want to deploy a phishing site. All you would have to do is the following: 1) Unzip the kit 2) Pick the directory corresponding the company you want to target 3) Edit a single file in the directory to input the email address you want the results emailed to 4) Deploy the directory onto a compromised host on the internet, and voila! - you have yourself a phishing site. If you take a look at the client side code (HTML and JavaScript) presented to your browser on a phishing site that targets a particular company, you will notice that other phishing sites that target the same company have similar characteristics. This is because, more often than not, the sites are deployed using popular phishing kits. The code within the kits is quite simple, mostly consisting of a web form that does the dirty work, along with image files and static content. The kits are often distributed amongst the phisher communities on message boards, and at times sold or traded for money or identities.