Application security

PhishTank luring in malicious sites

A new website that allows phishing victims to report malicious sites and then ranks users' effectiveness launched this Monday.

PhishTank, the creation of David Ulevitch, founder and CEO of OpenDNS, launched as a consumer-focused phishing resource.

Ulevitch told SCMagazine.com that home consumers' concerns are often ignored in the fight against phishing.

"The goals are two-fold. There's really no consumer-focused anti-phishing site and there's no resource for developers who want to build anti-phishing technology," he said. "It's also to be a clearinghouse of information, you can forward the email in or go to the site and paste in the URL. Or you can put in the URL and see if it's been marked as a phishing site, the user gets information that this is a bad site."

"With a lot of the big companies, it's a one-sided window. PhishTank is a way to say you got 10 phishes this week, and you'll see a notice that seven have been taken down," Ulevitch said.

PhishTank contains various statistics and an API, according to a company blog posting from John Roberts, vice president of product development for OpenDNS.

"The fight against phishing isn't just for the banks and big companies to tackle; you can help. Several of you have sent us phishing URLs to add to our lists already - thank you," he wrote. "OpenDNS is selfishly interested in having the best, most up-to-date data available, but we don't believe that proprietary data in this area is the answer: the API will be open to others, whether they contribute or not."

The site is also easy to non-security professionals, said Ulevitch.

"One of our goals is to make this as user friendly as possible. We were going to do this when we launched OpenDNS and we were taking the wait-and-see approach with other sites. We wanted to build something that was totally consumer oriented," he said. "I think people are going to find this pretty cool. What we heard from people is that they want a resource like this."

Click here to email Frank Washkuch Jr.

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