Building a Predictive Pipeline to Rapidly Detect Phishing Domains

BSidesCharm 2018

Presented by: Wes Connell
Date: Sunday April 29, 2018
Time: 15:00 - 15:50
Location: Track 2

Registering a new domain, requesting an SSL certificate, and installing it on the server got much cheaper for threat actors thanks to the LetsEncrypt Certificate Authority. Detecting new phishing domains has always been a reactive process for security teams; just like malware, one cannot provide threat intelligence on phishing domains before they're registered and operationalized.

The development of CertStream adds an interesting dimension for how this process can be improved. SSL certificates, and the domains for which they are issued, can now be monitored in real-time. Security analysts have intuition on what a phishing domain looks like when they see it. Building a predictive pipeline to detect SSL certificates issued to new phishing domains can be accomplished very simply using supervised machine learning. In this talk, I'll introduce a Python-based framework for building this predictive pipeline from scratch.

Wes Connell

@wesleyraptor Wes is especially motivated and passionate for dramatically improving data hunting tradecraft within the cyber security domain. He has a very broad range of technical interests - particularly in the securing hardware, software, systems, and networks. When he's not hacking the planet, he enjoys playing more golf than is healthy and painfully rooting for the Washington Capitals.


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