Phishing on Mobile Devices

We assess the risk of phishing on mobile platforms. Mobile operating systems and browsers lack secure application identity indicators, so the user cannot always identify whether a link has taken her to the expected application. We conduct a systematic analysis of ways in which mobile applications and web sites link to each other. To evaluate the risk, we study 85 web sites and 100 mobile applications and discover that web sites and applications regularly ask users to type their passwords into contexts that are vulnerable to spoofing. Our implementation of sample phishing attacks on the Android and iOS platforms demonstrates that attackers can spoof legitimate applications with high accuracy, suggesting that the risk of phishing attacks on mobile platforms is greater than has previously been appreciated.