Low-Effort, High-Impact Cat-Phishing (LFHICP) successful attacks are rising fast. See [1]
The term “cat-phishing” refers to a method where cyber criminals manipulate seemingly legitimate links to redirect users to malicious websites without their knowledge. This deceptive practice makes it nearly impossible for the average user to distinguish between a safe and a compromised site, thus facilitating the success of phishing attacks.
In this post, we consider a simple way to protect online accounts of users against cat-phishing attacks, using safety gates. A safety gate is an additional login page, before the main login page, which leads to a user online account. After login via a safety gate the user sees historical activity information, text and content provided by the user. If the user recognize this info then she/he on the right site and can safely login via the main login page. If the user does not recognize the info or this info does not appear at all then the user knows that this is a phishing site and she/he must leave this site. The site may have several safety gates before the main login page in order to increase security level of online accounts to the desired level.
Even if a hacker will be able to hack the first login page she/he will not be able to login into the user online account; the hacker only will be able to login into the first safety gate. The user quickly can discover this breach by viewing that someone was logged in the first safety gate. In this case the user changes the password to the first safety gate and restores security of the online account to the previous level.
For a simple implementation of this method see [2].
References:
[1] https://www.hackread.com/hp-reports-cat-phishing-targeting-users/
