This criminal organization first appeared in late 2004 and was given the name "Rock Phish" because the URLs (Uniform Resource Locators) on the group's fake sites included a distinctive subdirectory named "rock," a technique the group abandoned once phishing filters began looking for the word.
What causes particular concern among security experts such as Hubbard is Rock Phish's ability to stay one step ahead of both security products and law enforcement.
For example, Rock Phish pioneered image spam: the technique of sending e-mail messages in graphic files in order to bypass spam filters, according to security experts.
And just as browser makers have been building phishing filters into their products, the group has begun creating unique URLs for its phishing messages to get around blacklists of known phishing addresses.
These single-use URLS make it extremely difficult for antiphishing researchers to identify and block phishing pages, Symantec's Ramzan said.
This is bad news for products such as the Firefox browser, which uses a blacklist. "Ultimately, technologies that rely heavily on blacklists are going to be useless," Ramzan said.
Since then, it has grown to be one of the most prominent phishing groups in operation. It has developed a variety of new attack techniques that have earned the group a kind of grudging respect among security professionals, several of whom declined to be interviewed on the record for this story for fear of being physically harmed. They estimated that the criminal organization's phishing schemes have cost banks more than US$100 million to date.
Rock Phish is not known for targeting the two most popular phishing targets -- eBay and PayPal. Instead, it specializes in European and U.S. financial institutions. At last count, the group had spoofed 44 brands from businesses in nine countries, sending out e-mails that try to trick victims into visiting phony Web sites and entering information such as credit card numbers and passwords. Rock Phish sites have spoofed CitiBank, E*Trade, Barclays, and Deutsche Bank, among others.
Security experts estimated that Rock Phish is responsible for between one-third and one-half of all phishing messages being sent out on any given day. "They are probably the most active group of phishers in the world," said Dan Hubbard, senior director, security and technology research with Websense Inc.
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When a registrar registers a domain name, there is a five-day Add Grace Period (AGP) where he may cancel his request and receive a full credit for the registration fee from the registry. This trend has been gaining popularity since mid 2005, and although it was originally set up for avoiding mistakes, the practice now is frequently abused.
Beside the fact that some domainers use it to track names with a high potential to generate traffic and thus pay-per-click revenues, people who use the fast-flux and rockphish techniques, which we have already discussed here in detail, now use it in proportions that would be interesting to measure. Domain Tasting involves registering names only to release them very quickly and without paying for them. This practice exploded in 2007, and an incredible number of temporary domain names, having definitely been used to carry out malicious activities, were deleted at the end of this add-grace period.
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On the web site side, the expiration dates are reduced to 10 minutes (600 seconds), and the site’s IP addresses are very varied (fast-flux on web site). It’s the same for the domain name servers, which changed within a short period of time (fast-flux on name servers).
The ingredients are:
•lots of domain names,
•a fast-flux botnet network in double-flux mode,
•specialized software that is responsible for sending out phishing e-mails, where each recipient is assigned an index. This is used as a parameter in the URL, and again within the mirror site as long as the victim gets connected.
(a very good tut here!)
http://www.avertlabs.com/research/blog/ ... sh-part-2/
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ref:
http://www.infoworld.com/article/06/12/ ... ish_1.html
DNR
RockPhish
RockPhish
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He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in Darkness, and Light dwells with him.
He gives wisdom to the wise and knowledge to the discerning. He reveals deep and hidden things; he knows what lies in Darkness, and Light dwells with him.