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Milestone: 1 Million Phishes Submitted to PhishTank

By David Ulevitch, Founder/CEO

When OpenDNS launched PhishTank four years ago in Oct. 2006, we knew several things:

  • We wanted to make a clearinghouse for phishing data.
  • We wanted the data to be available for free to other services via an API.
  • There was no existing common source of phishing data that was fast-moving, accurate and reliable.

Today I’m excited to announce that the 1 millionth phish has been submitted to PhishTank. The “winning” submission was a fake Citibank UK website, which was quickly verified by the PhishTank community.
Thank you to the thousands of security pros, researchers, academics and concerned Internet users for their contributions to PhishTank. It’s you who have made this possible. You’ve protected tens of millions of people around the world, lending your expertise to help take the guesswork out of identifying phishing scams. It’s a credit to the community that we’ve reached this milestone. And in doing so, we’ve together helped protect not only people who use OpenDNS, but millions more, since the phishing scams reported and verified are also blocked by all of the Internet services PhishTank shares the data with.
As we look toward the next 1 million submissions to PhishTank (happening even more quickly), we know it’s just as important today as it was when we launched in 2006 to ensure that PhishTank continues to be the comprehensive data source companies like Yahoo and Mozilla have come to rely on. The community is an extremely important part of this, so part of recognizing the 1 million phishes milestone is recognizing the people who’ve put in the hard work.
The other part is, of course, the technology that keeps PhishTank running. Over the past two weeks we’ve begun deploying all new hardware for PhishTank’s infrastructure. And, in the coming months, we’ll devote increased engineering resources to it, as well. The goal is that these enhancements and investments will make PhishTank easier to use for the community of dedicated submitters and verifiers, and also faster-moving for the companies and organizations pulling data out.