Aug. 3, 2023, 1:10 a.m. | Giada Stivala, Sahar Abdelnabi, Andrea Mengascini, Mariano Graziano, Mario Fritz, Giancarlo Pellegrino

cs.CR updates on arXiv.org arxiv.org

Phishing PDFs are malicious PDF documents that do not embed malware but trick
victims into visiting malicious web pages leading to password theft or drive-by
downloads. While recent reports indicate a surge of phishing PDFs, prior works
have largely neglected this new threat, positioning phishing PDFs as
accessories distributed via email phishing campaigns.


This paper challenges this belief and presents the first systematic and
comprehensive study centered on phishing PDFs. Starting from a real-world
dataset, we first identify 44 phishing …

distributed documents downloads drive drive-by drive-by downloads email large malicious malware password pdf pdfs phishing reports scale study theft threat web

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