TY - GEN
T1 - Hiding in plain Sight
T2 - 24th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2017
AU - Kintis, Panagiotis
AU - Miramirkhani, Najmeh
AU - Lever, Charles
AU - Chen, Yizheng
AU - Romero-Gómez, Roza
AU - Pitropakis, Nikolaos
AU - Nikiforakis, Nick
AU - Antonakakis, Manos
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 author(s).
PY - 2017/10/30
Y1 - 2017/10/30
N2 - Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. In this work, we study a specific type of domain squatting called "combosquatting," in which attackers register domains that combine a popular trademark with one or more phrases (e.g., betterfacebook[.] com, youtube-live[.]com). We perform the first largescale, empirical study of combosquatting by analyzing more than 468 billion DNS records-collected from passive and active DNS data sources over almost six years. We find that almost 60% of abusive combosquatting domains live for more than 1,000 days, and even worse, we observe increased activity associated with combosquatting year over year. Moreover, we show that combosquatting is used to perform a spectrum of different types of abuse including phishing, social engineering, affiliate abuse, trademark abuse, and even advanced persistent threats. Our results suggest that combosquatting is a real problem that requires increased scrutiny by the security community.
AB - Domain squatting is a common adversarial practice where attackers register domain names that are purposefully similar to popular domains. In this work, we study a specific type of domain squatting called "combosquatting," in which attackers register domains that combine a popular trademark with one or more phrases (e.g., betterfacebook[.] com, youtube-live[.]com). We perform the first largescale, empirical study of combosquatting by analyzing more than 468 billion DNS records-collected from passive and active DNS data sources over almost six years. We find that almost 60% of abusive combosquatting domains live for more than 1,000 days, and even worse, we observe increased activity associated with combosquatting year over year. Moreover, we show that combosquatting is used to perform a spectrum of different types of abuse including phishing, social engineering, affiliate abuse, trademark abuse, and even advanced persistent threats. Our results suggest that combosquatting is a real problem that requires increased scrutiny by the security community.
KW - Combosquatting
KW - Domain Name System
KW - Domain Squatting
KW - Network Security
UR - https://www.scopus.com/pages/publications/85041445188
U2 - 10.1145/3133956.3134002
DO - 10.1145/3133956.3134002
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85041445188
T3 - Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
SP - 569
EP - 586
BT - CCS 2017 - Proceedings of the 2017 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PB - Association for Computing Machinery
Y2 - 30 October 2017 through 3 November 2017
ER -