PhishTank is alive, and filling up.
PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others’ submissions. Unlike other anti-phishing efforts that may come to mind, PhishTank is totally free to use and open to access.
After a qualified number of users collectively agree that a suspected phish is, in fact, a real phish, the phish becomes verified. (Amit drew the Digg parallel.)
But we didn’t stop there. Because we genuinely want to stop phishing and believe firmly that phishing data should not cost money, PhishTank has a free and open API. Our hope is that developers will use PhishTank data to build anti-phishing elements into their tools.
And you’ve probably guessed by now how OpenDNS uses PhishTank data. Once the PhishTank community collectively verifies a phish, we conduct an additional layer of checks and balances and ultimately block the phish for OpenDNS users (if the users have phishing protection enabled, of course). We still get phishing data from other sources, too, but we think you’re going to help make PhishTank our best source.
We want OpenDNS to be the best it can possibly be, and in order for that to happen we need the best phishing data available. But we’re not selfish — the data belongs to all of us.
Read more about PhishTank here and let us know what you think!
