Sunrise to Sunset: Analyzing the End-to-end Life Cycle and Effectiveness of Phishing Attacks at Scale

Despite an extensive anti-phishing ecosystem, phishing attacks continue to capitalize on gaps in detection to reach a significant volume of daily victims. In this paper, we isolate and identify these detection gaps by measuring the end-to-end life cycle of large-scale phishing attacks. We develop a unique framework—Golden Hour—that allows us to passively measure victim traffic to phishing pages while proactively protecting tens of thousands of accounts in the process. Over a one year period, our network monitor recorded 4.8 million victims who visited phishing pages, excluding crawler traffic. We use these events and related data sources to dissect phishing campaigns: from the time they first come online, to email distribution, to visitor traffic, to ecosystem detection, and finally to account compromise. We find the average campaign from start to the last victim takes just 21 hours. At least 7.42% of visitors supply their credentials and ultimately experience a compromise and subsequent fraudulent transaction. Furthermore, a small collection of highly successful campaigns are responsible for 89.13% of victims. Based on our findings, we outline potential opportunities to respond to these sophisticated attacks.