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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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PC Support Tags: Add new tag, Computer security, Identity theft, Phishtank, Security, Theft

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Mike Sachoff
Writer
2010-01-11

Email security firm, Red Condor has issued a warning for an aggressive spear phishing email campaign that asks recipients to “apply a new set of settings” to their mailboxes because of a recent “security upgrade” of their mailing service.

Phishing Campaign Targets Microsoft Outlook Users

An embedded link in the email connects users to a website that appears to be a Microsoft Office Outlook Web Access page. On the page, users are directed to “download and launch a file with a new set of settings for your email account.” The file is actually a Zbot Trojan virus similar to Trojans distributed in recent H1N1 and Facebook phishing attacks.

“This spear phishing campaign is unusual in that it is highly personalized and is targeting a very large number of domains with a customized message for each domain,” said Dr. Tom Steding, president and CEO of Red Condor.

“Spear phishing campaigns usually target a single organization or domain, but his attack broke the mold as the volume and targets are very high. Once again, this is a perfect example of scammers modifying their tactics to thwart traditional security systems and demonstrates the importance of having an advanced, real-time email security solution.”

A spear phishing campaign is a highly targeted form of phishing that typically targets a single organization. Emails appear as if they come from a trusted source, such as an employer who would normally send an email to the entire company or a well-known organization.

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PC Support Tags: Add new tag, Microsoft, Microsoft Outlook, Phishing, Security, Website

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With over 70% of all web attacks is carried out over the web application level, mod security is an essential tool that every web server should have to detect and block these web base attack. Mod security is an application firewall integrated with apache. Basically, mod security is a module for apache webserver (note: it is not an apache tomcat webserver) and it needs to be configured with apache http server. Mod security is a great tool, if you want to prevent the use of malicious apache. When i start httpd and stop litespeed ,then the mod security is working and blocking the ip when someone access the url. Mod security is a part of the web server, in which you can define certain “rules” to block potentially dangerous requests to the server. Mod security is effectively a firewall for web based apps and can help prevent attacks on programs that would otherwise be vulnerable. Mod security is very powerful if properly deployed but the default rules do not apply to many situations. Personally mod security is nice in the sense that you use it to tighten the security. Mod security is a useful apache module that monitor your web server to detect intrusion attempts in real time.

PC Support Tags: Apache HTTP Server, Firewall, Security, Technical support, Web server