TRIDENT: Towards Detecting and Mitigating Web-based Social Engineering Attacks

As the weakest link in cybersecurity, humans have become the main target of attackers who take advantage of sophisticated web-based social engineering techniques. These attackers leverage low-tier ad networks to inject social engineering components onto web pages to lure users into websites that the attackers control for further exploitation. Most of these exploitations are Web-based Social Engineering Attacks (WSEAs), such as reward and lottery scams. Although researchers have proposed systems and tools to detect some WSEAs, these approaches are very tailored to specific scam techniques (i.e., tech support scams, survey scams) only. They were not designed to be effective against a broad set of attack techniques. With the ever-increasing diversity and sophistication of WSEAs that any user can encounter, there is an urgent need for new and more effective in-browser systems that can accurately detect generic WSEAs.

To address this need, we propose TRIDENT, a novel defense system that aims to detect and block generic WSEAs in real-time. TRIDENT stops WSEAs by detecting Social Engineering Ads (SE-ads), the entry point of general web social engineering attacks distributed by low-tier ad networks at scale. Our extensive evaluation shows that TRIDENT can detect SE-ads with an accuracy of 92.63% and a false positive rate of 2.57% and is robust against evasion attempts. We also evaluated TRIDENT against the state-of-the-art ad-blocking tools. The results show that TRIDENT outperforms these tools with a 10% increase in accuracy. Additionally, TRIDENT only incurs 2.13% runtime overhead as a median rate, which is small enough to deploy in production.