Royal Bank of Canada
SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DIGITALLY FINGERPRINTING PHISHING ACTORS

Abstract:

Websites, having associated features, are clustered by filtering entries that may be legitimate, determining feature similarity scores between the website features, and generating an aggregated similarity matrix containing website similarity scores between the websites. Websites are clustered into clusters or groups, based in part on the aggregated similarity matrix. Each cluster is identified by a cluster identifier and represents a centroid website and other websites at a normalized similarity score from the centroid. It is determined for each website whether the normalized similarity score is less than a threshold, and if so is identified as weakly-similar. Above the threshold, the website is labelled with the cluster identifier. Further clustering and thresholding is performed on the weakly-similar websites into additional clusters.