Cloud Based Content Fetching: Using Cloud Infrastructure to Obfuscate Phishing Scam Analysis

Phishing has become a crippling problem for many of today´s internet users. Despite innovations in preventative measures, phishing has evolved to become very hard to detect. Determining whether a particular site is a phishing site or not is difficult, causing many inexperienced users to fall victim. Phishing site operators often actively prevent anti-phishing measures by detecting and blacklisting the IP addresses that try to probe them. In this paper, we propose using a cloud infrastructure to mask our identity from assumed phishing sites through the use of virtual machines spread across many geographic regions. Our system presents different personas and user behavior to the phishing sites by using different IP addresses and different browsing configurations. By running a 10-day probe experiment against real phishing site, we show the effectiveness of this approach in preventing detection and blocking of anti-phishing probes by the phishing site operators.