Characterizing Event-themed Malicious Web Campaigns: A Case Study on War-themed Websites

Abstract: Cybercrimes such as online scams and fraud have become prevalent. Cybercriminals often abuse various global or regional events as themes of their fraudulent activities to breach user trust and attain a higher attack success rate. These attacks attempt to manipulate and deceive innocent people into interacting with meticulously crafted websites with malicious payloads, phishing, or fraudulent transactions. To deepen our understanding of the problem, this paper investigates how to characterize event-themed malicious website-based campaigns, with a case study on war-themed websites. We find that attackers tailor their attacks by exploiting the unique aspects of events, as evidenced by activities such as fundraising, providing aid, collecting essential supplies, or seeking updated news. We use explainable unsupervised clustering methods to draw further insights, which could guide the design of effective early defenses against various event-themed malicious web campaigns.