Phishing Scams

Introduction

Malicious activities like identity theft, harassment and phishing activities are conducted by the cyber criminals by making use of the anonymous context of the cyber world to their advantage. Phishing scams are conducted in such a manner by the scammers that websites are created by them and emails are sent out in order to trick the account holders into revealing sensitive information like passwords and account numbers. These crimes are usually solved by the investigators in such a manner that they back trap the IP addresses on the basis of the data which is present in the header of these anonymous emails. Although, at times the information which is gathered from the IP address isn’t enough to identify the culprit in case that the information is sent from a proxy server or if the computer used to send the email has more than one user (Fouss et al, 2010).

The main problem with anonymity is that the authorship analysis techniques are used to address the online communication. There is a long history associated with the study of authorship when it comes to solving authorial disputes like poetic and historic work, although, in case of the online textual communication the study of authorship analysis is very restricted. The reason behind this is the fact that in the traditional written works there is a lot of data which is written in a very well-structured manner by making use of the grammatical rules and common syntactic. Whereas, in comparison to this the online documents like the instant messages and emails are written in a short and poorly structured manner, these are written mostly in the paragraph language and have a lot of grammatical and spelling mistakes. Due to these differences some of the features of authors...

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...uld require the suspects writing sample so that it could be checked against the samples available to the investigator. This problem can be solved by getting writing samples from the email or blog archives of the suspects and matching them to the investigation samples. The second problem is regarding the lack of data or samples to match them against the work done by the suspects, this problem can be solved by asking the suspects to give live samples of their writings to match against what little evidence is present. The third problem is regarding the lack of information about the criminal such as, if it is male or female, young or old etc. This problem can be solved by making use of some of the external sources such as blog, and social sites to see something written by someone that is relevant to the samples that the investigator has and to observe the writing style.