huntertrace 1.2.0

Advanced phishing actor attribution using Bayesian inference and graph analysis

HUNTERTRACE

Advanced phishing actor attribution using multi-signal Bayesian inference and infrastructure graph analysis

Overview

HUNTERTRACE is an open-source phishing attribution engine that identifies the geographic origin of phishing actors through multi-signal Bayesian inference, combining 8+ orthogonal signals to bypass VPN and proxy obfuscation. Evaluated on 53 labeled emails, it achieves 52.8% country-level and 56.6% region-level accuracy — outperforming single-signal methods — with larger-scale validation ongoing.

Traditional email forensics relies on IP geolocation alone (~31% accuracy). HUNTERTRACE fuses 8+ orthogonal signals through Bayesian inference:

Signal	Source	VPN-Resistant
Webmail IP leaks	X-Originating-IP, X-Sender-IP headers	Yes
Timezone offset	Date header / Received chain	Yes
Language fingerprint	Content-Type charset, Subject encoding	Yes
Infrastructure reuse	Graph centrality across campaigns	Yes
Hop chain forgery	Received header consistency	Partial
VPN exit node mapping	ASN + hosting provider classification	N/A
SPF/DKIM/DMARC	Authentication results	Partial
Webmail provider	Header fingerprinting (Gmail/Yahoo/Outlook)	Yes

Architecture

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│                    HUNTERTRACE PIPELINE                     │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│                                                             │
│  Stage 1: Header Extraction (RFC 2822 parsing)              │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Webmail IP Leak Detection (X-Originating-IP extraction)    │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Stage 2: IP Classification (VPN/Tor/Proxy/Residential)     │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Stage 3A: Enrichment (WHOIS, ASN, hosting provider)        │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  VPN Backtrack Analysis (12 bypass techniques)              │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Real IP Extraction (strips proxy layers)                   │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Stage 3B: Threat Intelligence                              │
│  Stage 3C: Correlation Analysis                             │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Stage 4: Geolocation (city-level, IPv4 + IPv6)             │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Stage 5: Attribution Analysis (evidence packaging)         │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Bayesian Multi-Signal Fusion (ACI confidence scoring)      │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Sender Classification (hop forgery + timezone analysis)    │
│      ↓                                                      │
│  Output: JSON report + text summary + attack graph HTML     │
│                                                             │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Quick Start

Installation

pip install huntertrace

Python API

from huntertrace import HunterTrace

# Run the full 7-stage pipeline
pipeline = HunterTrace(verbose=True)
result = pipeline.run("phishing.eml")

# Generate text report
report = result.generate_report()
print(report.generate_text_report())

# Access Bayesian attribution
bayes = result.bayesian_attribution
if bayes:
    print(f"Region: {bayes.primary_region}")
    print(f"Confidence: {bayes.aci_adjusted_prob:.1%}")
    print(f"Tier: {bayes.tier} — {bayes.tier_label}")

Command Line

# Single email analysis
huntertrace analyze phishing.eml --verbose

# Batch processing
huntertrace batch emails/ -o results/

# Campaign correlation (cross-email actor linking)
huntertrace campaign emails/ -o campaign_report/

Performance

Evaluated on a labeled corpus of 53 phishing emails with known ground-truth origins:

Method	Top-1 Country Accuracy	Notes
IP Geolocation Only	~31%	Industry baseline
Timezone Only	~52%	VPN-resistant, coarse
HUNTERTRACE (Bayesian)	52.8%	Multi-signal fusion
HUNTERTRACE (+ Graph)	56.6%	Region-level accuracy

95% Confidence Interval: 39.7% – 65.6% (n=53)
Webmail IP Leak Rate: 37.7% of analyzed emails
Coverage: 100% (no failed predictions)

⚠️ Note: Performance numbers are based on an initial corpus of 53 labeled emails. Larger-scale validation is in progress. Region-level accuracy (56.6%) is more reliable than country-level given current corpus size.

✨ Key Features

• 🎯 Multi-Signal Attribution (8+ signals)
• 🔓 VPN Bypass (webmail leaks, timezone)
• 🕸️ Graph Analysis (infrastructure reuse)
• 📊 Bayesian Fusion (probabilistic)

🚀 Quick Start

git clone https://github.com/akshaydotweb/HunterTrace.git
cd HunterTrace
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Analyze email
python hunterTrace.py analyze phishing.eml

📖 Documentation

• Technical Summary
• Installation Guide
• API Documentation

🔬 Evaluation

Dataset: 53 labeled phishing emails
Methodology: Manual OSINT labeling with ground truth

• Top-1 Country Accuracy: 52.8%
• Top-1 Region Accuracy: 56.6%
• 95% Confidence Interval: 39.7% – 65.6%
• Webmail Leak Rate: 37.7%
• Macro F1: 0.37

See evaluation/ for full results.

🎓 Citation

@software{huntertrace2026,
  author = {[Your Name]},
  title = {HUNTERTRACE: Multi-Signal Phishing Attribution},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://github.com/akshaydotweb/HunterTrace}
}

📄 License

MIT License - See LICENSE

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Black Hat Arsenal 2026 Submission