What? Please forward to me! :-)

Do you have the PhishTank SiteChecker plugin installed with Firefox? Are you using Opera? Both of those use our datasets and sometimes link back to our phish detail page.

Thanks…

-david

The DDoS attacks have been targeting EveryDNS and not OpenDNS or PhishTank. In fact, PhishTank doesn’t even use EveryDNS.

Maybe their actions are an attempt to distact me though, that’d be a bit too intelligent for a DDoS’er though. Remember, they are already breaking the law and in most cases are pretty easy to arrest these days, even internationally. :-)

-david

You are absolutely correct that other areas are responsible for the phishing scams just as much, and in some cases more than the countries listed. What the world map represents is where the most phishing sites are HOSTED. This doesn’t mean it’s where the target (ebay, paypal, etc) are and it also doesn’t mean it is where the spammer/phisher sent the email from.

When you look at it from that sense, it’s nor surprising. South Korea, China, and The United States of America all have relatively dense broadband deployments, datacenters and connectivity. When a phisher compromises a server (or buys one with a fake credit card from a hosting company) it’s not too surprising that it’s from one of these locations.

Does that help explain that statistic a bit better?

Thanks for the good feedback and questions!

-david ulevitch

What surprises me, however, is the failure of Europe (East and West), Russia and the African continent to make a meaningful contribution to these statistics. I am sure that there are many smart scam artists in all of these areas…in fact, I am still receiving offers from supposedly wealthy families in the Ivory Coast to “help” them move millions of dollars of money.

Some questions for the PhishTank folks (or you, Paul):

Is the lack of representation in these areas due to more effective policing efforts? Or, is PhishTank not as effective at identifying sites from these areas? Or, are the country sizes so small that contributions from these countries are less noticed on a country-by-country list (not that South Korea is all that big)?