During the COVID-19 and unprecedented changes globally, there is an increase in email (20% increase in email open rates) which correspondingly increases the risk of hacking attacks.
It has been reported that phishing attacks using COVID-19 as a lure increased by 667% between February 2020 and March 2020. Furthermore, the ENISA Threat Landscape 2020 reports characterize phishing attacks as one of the most critical cyber threats of 2020. These recent events show that phishing attacks continue to be a critical threat and that further research to eliminate them. A serious reason for the difficulty in finding solutions to the increasingly dangerous phenomenon of phishing attacks is the lack of public disclosure of data and patterns from phishing attacks. It should also be emphasized that almost 70% of the research uses old datasets as shown in the research “SoK: A Comprehensive Reexamination of Phishing Research From the Security Perspective”, published in IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials, vol. 22, no. 1, pp. 671-708 in 2020.
The team at the Security Systems Laboratory (SSL) of the University of Piraeus, among other security-related projects, is working in the field of phishing attack detection to identify effective ways to leverage advances in artificial intelligence to detect, flag, and block phishing messages. On the contrary, the limited phishing attack data currently available is not sufficient to continue research effectively.
Thus, efforts are being made to create a new phishing attack dataset that will include the latest trends in phishing emails received by companies and individual users.
The results of the relevant research as well as the entire data, once they are ready, will be freely available and will be shared with the general public. Of course, if any of you who have sent data and contributed to the research want to be made public and wish to receive special recognition, this is also possible.
In order to create this dataset, the valuable help of Secnews!
Any phishing email you or your company has received in the last four years will be of great help in this effort to find an effective solution to the phishing phenomenon.
There are multiple ways you can send the phishing emails you have received:
- Email to Secnews secnews@secnews.gr
- Email to the Digital Systems Security Laboratory ds_sec@unipi.gr
- Uploading relevant emails to the cloud space here.
- or in any other way you want.
Data collection will take place until February 28, 2021. After this period, further analysis and evaluation of the data will take place.
Finally, it is important to mention that before sharing phishing messages, we advise you to hide all sensitive information and anonymize it. For our part, we will ensure anonymity in the data we receive, using the k-anonymity technique. From all of us, we thank you in advance for your time and contribution!
