Catching Phishers with Honey-Mail

Phishing, once an online annoyance, has become a major epidemic on the Web. This form of mass social engineering is causing great economic losses to financial and retail institutions, Internet Service Providers (ISPs), as well as the general public. After providing a brief explanation of what exactly phishing is and its economic impact, a proactive strategy will be laid out that has been effectively used to investigate a real world phishing scheme. This case study will be highly sanitized due to its sensitive nature. For the purposes of this paper, the corporation involved will be called OnlineTrinkets.biz. Any similarities to this or any other online businesses, ISPs, or other service providers, are unintentional.