Nigerian princes, shipping invoices, and special offers: Where are the people behind these phishing scams located? One way to find out is to manually reply to each phishing email. Another is to automate the reply process and see what the scammers reveal.
Robbie Gallagher, an application security engineer with Atlassian, opted for the latter approach. His Honey-Phish project, which he described at the recent Shmoocon security conference, automatically replied to phishing messages with an email containing a specially crafted link, then analyzed the resulting click-through data. In essence, he phished the phishers to find their location
The goal is to eventually release heat maps of where phishing attacks originate. Gallagher had two clicks in time for his presentation: one from Brazil and the other from Romania. It’s not a lot, but it’s a start.
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