What Are Phishing Kits And Their Off The Shelf Tools?

The most common way that scammers use to attack the general users is by creating fake pages of well-known brands that look exactly like those of official websites, therefore, people usually fail to distinguish the fake website from the official page of the brand. This trick is commonly used by cybercriminals where they also create their URL address containing the name of famous websites for their fake company which makes it very difficult to suspect them of their claimed services. This scamming technique is also known as 'combo squatting'

Since phishing sites can be blocked and made dysfunctional easily, therefore, it increases the load on the cybercriminals as they have to keep refreshing and developing these sites constantly. Keeping these pages from constantly getting blocked is difficult and takes a lot of time and certainly not every cybercriminal is loaded with adequate resources to prevent this issue. This is the reason why phishing kits are popular among cybercriminals because these kits are like ready-made templates containing all the guiding information a cybercriminal needs to create a fake website on a huge scale. Phishing kits are so easy to follow that even an inexperienced person lacking any technical attacking skills whatsoever can also get a hold of it and use it.

Phishing kits are developed to create copies of websites of famous brands that have a large number of users and followers. Obviously, the more the number of potential victims, the more certain the chances to steal money from them. The phishing kits detected in 2021, as per Securelist, had created copies of Facebook, the Dutch banking group ING, the German bank Sparkasse, as well as Adidas and Amazon the most.


The attackers create fake website pages by following only two essentialities provided by the phishing kit. First, scammers create an HTML page through a phishing kit and keep the design, style, and script identical to the official page of the famous brand's audience they are aiming for. There is only a slight difference between the phishing HTML address and the official address of the page, but the difference sometimes proves to be so minor that the general audience usually fails to notice and easily falls into the hands of these cybercriminals.

Secondly, the phishing kit comes with an inbuilt script that sends the data entered by the users of the phishing site of the official brand directly to the cybercriminals. Scammers also avail of third-party online resources such as telegrams, emails, etc. where the phishing kit could easily be used to steal and send the data of the victims. The process of stealing the information from victims starts with a basic not so visibly suspicious step, where the user I asked to give his personal information or allow the access of phishing sites to their sensitive data.

To identify these scam websites, you should look out for those pages that don’t load immediately rather than new sites begin to open and start to load, plus typos in the URL with weird English usage can be a sign of alert. These secondary sites contain traps making a large number of people lose their hard-earned money every day.

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