Introducing PhishTank
Thanks to some great PR information from Allison Rhodes at OpenDNS, I have learned that PhishTank has launched today, at the beginning of National Cyber Security Awareness Month. PhishTank as you can probably guess from its spelling has something to do with online phishing, phishers and malware. Created by the innovative people at OpenDNS, it creates an openly accessible database of known phishing sites. The best part, however, is that users have the ability to access the database and various stats via an open (read: free, as in WordPress) API.
Actually I lied, the best part is the ability for users to submit any phishing sites they come across; either by email, the web or their API. PhishTank creates a community among its users and is probably the first “social media meets phish fighting web service” service. That being said, users can verify phishing sites submitted by other users ensuring that people can’t just submit PaulStamatiou.com as phishing site. There are also some backend mechanisms in place so that a group of users can’t game the system (like people do with digg) and verify good sites as phishing sites.
Adding a phish on PhishTank is a simple process.. I just submitted 4 in the last few minutes. You can either go straight to submitting the phish or you can check to see if PhishTank is already aware of the phishing site you are looking to report, with the “Is it a phish?” form on the homepage. Then, adding a phishing site is as easy as providing the offending URL, email content and the organization the phishing site is pretending to be.
I can already see someone developing a WordPress plugin, or perhaps an update to Akismet, that utilizes PhishTank’s API to check commenters’ URLs to ensure they aren’t phishing sites. I must give the OpenDNS guys a thumbs up, PhishTank is an ingenious name requiring almost no explanation. Check it out and become part of the community by creating an account. If you still have questions, PhishTank has a mighty comprehensive FAQ. And if you’re still scratching your head as to what OpenDNS is, take a look at my post entitled OpenDNS Makes Your Internet Ãœber.
Wow, that was fast! Thanks for the awesome write-up.
Since your blog is read by smart folks and smart folks might ask why we’re doing this I’ll just save them from wading through the FAQ:
From the FAQ: “OpenDNS is interested in having the best available information about phishing websites. However, phishing data is not a place to be competitive, and we believe that sharing this data freely (even with those who do not contribute) will benefit us all.”
Finally, we’re just getting started with the API, so we are definitely looking for functions and things to add. We’ll be doing that all week. We also hope to have a Thunderbird extension and outlook plug-in ready sometime this week (but it might take another weekend :-) ).
It’s an interesting user driven service that attempts to solve a nasty problem. I can’t wait to see a SpamAssassin plugin and email client plugins. I’ll be interested to see the stats on false positives, total positive hits, percent of phishing mails it hits, and such down the road. If it ends up having good accurancy and a very low occurance of false positives, it will end up being a valuable service. The service has a great interface and it will become much more useful once email plugins are available (as well as any number of applications where phishing is an issue). I’d love to see a “Submit to PhishTank” button next to the “Not Junk” button in messages flagged as junk in Mail.app.
That was good find paul.
I wish you can find some spyware and activx based virus installer sites.such sites should be included in that site as well.
Good work.Keep it up.
If PhishTank was free as in WordPress that would include downloading the source, which isn’t necessarily a good thing when it is is in some people’s interest to game the system.
This is a small point in an otherwise great article about a great service!