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Phishing In The Free Waters: A Study Of Phishing Attacks Created Using Free Website Building Services, Sayak Saha Roy, Karanjit Unique, Shirin Nilizadeh

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Free Website Building services (FWBs) provide individuals with a cost-effective and convenient way to create a website without requiring advanced technical knowledge or coding skills. However, malicious actors often abuse these services to host phishing websites. In this work, we propose FreePhish, a scalable framework to continuously identify phishing websites that are created using FWBs. Using FreePhish, we were able to detect and characterize more than 31.4K phishing URLs that were created using 17 unique free website builder services and shared on Twitter and Facebook over a period of six months. We find that FWBs provide attackers with several features …