PhishTank report: Top phishing trends in January 2010
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Phishtank is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the internet. Launched in October 2006 to coincide with national cyber security awareness month, Phishtank is the world’s only collaborative clearinghouse for phishing data. Phishtank is operated by openDNS, a free service that makes your internet safer, faster, and smarter. As the site relies on user input, the easier the site is to use the greater the participation will be (Phishtank is actually fairly easy to use, but some have called for an easier verification process). I must give the openDNS guys a thumb up, Phishtank is an ingenious name requiring almost no explanation. Phishing protection powered by Phishtank is on by default for the millions of users of openDNS free service. So I might be completely off the right foot here, but my guess is that Phishtank is truly a community effort a huge coalition of security vendors which use the submitted phishing data to improve their security tools. Phishtank is a good idea and should help with the identification of many more phishing sites. So far it looks like Phishtank is very trustable and that’s very amazing for a free site. It’s gotten some key commercial attention as well: Phishtank is integrated into the latest version of the opera browser; and Mozilla used Phishtank data in its comparison testing of Firefox’s anti-phishing feature versus internet explorer 7′s. My understanding is that Phishtank is not a takedown service so I’m not sure what additional help they will provide in actually taking them offline unless domain registrars start using the APIS (which registrars have been notoriously bad about doing).
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