Internet and telephones are part of everyone's modern life. Unfortunately, several criminal activities also rely on these technologies to reach their victims. While the use and importance of the Internet has been largely studied, previous work overlooked the role that phone numbers can play in understanding online threats.In this work we aim at determining if leveraging phone numbers analysis can improve our understanding of the underground markets, illegal computer activities, or cyber-crime in general. This knowledge could then be adopted by several defensive mechanisms, including blacklists or advanced spam heuristics.Our results show that, in scam activities, phone numbers remain often more stable over time than email addresses. Using a combination of graph analysis and geographical Home Location Register (HLR) lookups, we identify recurrent cyber-criminal business models and link together scam communities that spread over different countries.
Nigerian scam is a popular form of fraud in which the fraudster tricks the victim into paying a certain amount of money under the promise of a future, larger payoff.Using a public dataset, in this paper we study how these forms of scam campaigns are organized and evolve over time. In particular, we discuss the role of phone numbers as important identifiers to group messages together and depict the way scammers operate their campaigns. In fact, since the victim has to be able to contact the criminal, both email addresses and phone numbers need to be authentic and they are often unchanged and re-used for a long period of time. We also present in details several examples of Nigerian scam campaigns, some of which last for several years -representing them in a graphical way and discussing their characteristics.
Automatic Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast (ADS-B) is a cornerstone of the next-generation digital sky and is now mandated in several countries. However, there have been many reports of serious security vulnerabilities in the ADS-B architecture. In this paper, we demonstrate and evaluate the impact of multiple cyberattacks on ADS-B via remote radio frequency links that affected various network, processing, and display subsystems used within the ADS-B ecosystem.Overall we implemented and tested 12 cyberattacks on ADS-B in a controlled environment, out of which 5 attacks were presented or implemented for the first time. For all these attacks, we developed a unique testbed that consisted of 13 hardware devices and 22 software that ran on Android, iOS, Linux, and Windows operating systems, which result in a total of 36 tested configurations. Each of the attacks was successful on various subsets of the tested configurations. In some attacks, we discovered wide qualitative variations and discrepancies in how particular configurations react to and treat ADS-B inputs that contain errors or contradicting flight information, with the main culprit almost always being the software implementation. In some other attacks, we managed to cause Denial of Service (DoS) by remotely crashing/impacting more than 50% of the test-set that corresponded to those attacks.Besides demonstrating successful attacks, we also implemented, investigated, and report herein some practical countermeasures to these attacks. We demonstrated that the strong relationship between the received signal strength and the distance-toemitter might help verify the aircraft's advertised ADS-B position and distance. For example, our best machine learning models achieved 90% accuracy in detecting spoofed ADS-B signals, which may be effectively used to distinguish ADS-B signals of real aircraft from spoofed signals of attackers.
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