A Proactive Approach to Preventing Phishing Attacks Using Pshark

Phishing is an online scam used to dupe people out of their personal information for the purpose of defrauding them. This paper presents a conceptual design for removing phishing pages that have been uploaded on a website, potentially without knowledge of the website owner or host server. Initially the system is alerted to the presence of a phishing page upon receiving the Phisher’s solicitation e-mail. Next the system retrieves the location, IP address and contact information of the host server using a tracking program. Finally, the system sends notification to the Administrator about the phishing page on its server. It is then up to the host server Administrator to remove the phishing page from its server, or face the possibility of criminals continuing to use their site. This approach acts as the basis for further development into proactively (or aggressively) attacking Phishers directly, rather than being a reactionary approach that is common to most email filters and anti-virus software.