Sound-skwatter (Did You Mean: Sound-squatter?) AI-powered Generator for
  Phishing Prevention
Rodolfo Valentim Idilio Drago Marco Mellia Federico Cerutti
Sound-squatting is a phishing attack that tricks users into malicious
resources by exploiting similarities in the pronunciation of words. Proactive
defense against sound-squatting candidates is complex, and existing solutions
rely on manually curated lists of homophones. We here introduce Sound-skwatter,
a multi-language AI-based system that generates sound-squatting candidates for
proactive defense. Sound-skwatter relies on an innovative multi-modal
combination of Transformers Networks and acoustic models to learn sound
similarities. We show that Sound-skwatter can automatically list known
homophones and thousands of high-quality candidates. In addition, it covers
cross-language sound-squatting, i.e., when the reader and the listener speak
different languages, supporting any combination of languages. We apply
Sound-skwatter to network-centric phishing via squatted domain names. We find ~
10% of the generated domains exist in the wild, the vast majority unknown to
protection solutions. Next, we show attacks on the PyPI package manager, where
~ 17% of the popular packages have at least one existing candidate. We believe
Sound-skwatter is a crucial asset to mitigate the sound-squatting phenomenon
proactively on the Internet. To increase its impact, we publish an online demo
and release our models and code as open source.