NetCraft Launching Anti-Phishing Service

from the sounds-good dept

“Phishing” scams, where a scammer sends a fake email pretending to be from a legitimate site and tries to get people go to a real-looking site and give away all their personal details and/or passwords, are becoming increasingly popular. However, as scams grow, so do the scam fighters. NetCraft, known for monitoring what systems are used to host websites, is going to launch a phishing detection service. Since they already keep track of registered domain names, and crawls sites, recording their home page. The service will specifically look for domain names that are similar to the names of companies that sign up for the service – while also comparing actual websites to try to catch phishing sites before they have a chance to scam people. Sounds like a useful service.


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Comments on “NetCraft Launching Anti-Phishing Service”

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2 Comments
LittleW0lf says:

Phishing Alert Services...

This all sounds great, but pre-emptive. After receiving my 6th phishing scam email today (for AOL, which I am not, and have not been for 15 years now, a member of, to an email address which obviously has nothing to do with AOL,) I wondered when someone would start doing something about it. I’ve personally been debating putting up a “Stupid Human Tricks” website with all these phishing scams on it, disecting each one to show how it is set up and how it works, as well as research on who is behind it, but I don’t want the FBI or “cops” getting the wrong ideas and thinking I am actually trying to teach these idiots how to phish.

I would love to see the service work more like Spamhaus or SPEAS, where domain registries are alerted to scams and given the opportunity to kill off the domain or face coercive action (I am still waiting for Yahoo! to drop securedaol.com, won’t likely happen soon though the host of the site has already killed the server.)

Having something like this will go along way to cutting these idiots out of the internet. Still, it would be nice to have a website like the one I am debating without worry of the cops shutting it down.

Leen (user link) says:

Re: Phishing Alert Services...

I am considered by Tiscali as a spam-address because there are people who abuse my e-mailaddres and url. It causes a lot of troubles because a lot of people having @yucom.be or @tiscali.be or a related tiscali-address do not receive my e-mail. Either the Scarlet-service (I am located with Scarlet formerly Planet-Internet nor the Tiscali-people can find where the problem is located by which I am considered to be a spammer… And I assure you: I am NOT sending any spam around but I receive monthly about 1500 spam-mails.

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