CAPEC Definitions

    CAPEC Definitions / CAPEC-98

    CAPEC-98: Phishing

    Phishing is a social engineering technique where an attacker masquerades as a legitimate entity with which the victim might do business in order to prompt the user to reveal some confidential information (very frequently authentication credentials) that can later be used by an attacker. Phishing is essentially a form of information gathering or fishing for information.

    Severity:Very High
    Possibility:High

    Extended Description

    No Extended Description.

    Mitigations

    Do not follow any links that you receive within your e-mails and certainly do not input any login credentials on the page that they take you too. Instead, call your Bank, PayPal, eBay, etc., and inquire about the problem. A safe practice would also be to type the URL of your bank in the browser directly and only then log in. Also, never reply to any e-mails that ask you to provide sensitive information of any kind.

    Relationships with other CAPECs

    CAPEC-151: Identity Spoofing

    CAPEC-89: Pharming

    CAPEC-543: Counterfeit Websites

    CAPEC-611: BitSquatting

    CAPEC-630: TypoSquatting

    CAPEC-631: SoundSquatting

    CAPEC-632: Homograph Attack via Homoglyphs

    Prerequisites

    An attacker needs to have a way to initiate contact with the victim. Typically that will happen through e-mail.

    An attacker needs to correctly guess the entity with which the victim does business and impersonate it. Most of the time phishers just use the most popular banks/services and send out their hooks to many potential victims.

    An attacker needs to have a sufficiently compelling call to action to prompt the user to take action.

    The replicated website needs to look extremely similar to the original website and the URL used to get to that website needs to look like the real URL of the said business entity.

    Related Weaknesses

    CWE-451: User Interface (UI) Misrepresentation of Critical Information