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Help the fight against phishing with Phishtank

Joe — Sun, 23 Aug 2009 22:13:48 +0000

For anti-phishing tools to work, phishing sites must be identified to analyse and to warn people about.

Sites like Web of Trust allow users to share information about phishing sites, but scores of similar tools exist and as it would be counter-productive for each to maintain their own database of phishing sites.

PhishTank centralises phishing reports and allows developers to use their data free-of-charge in their own applications, with manual or automatic download enabled (although the latter requires a free API key).

PhishTank offers a service a lot of web users will use without even realising it. Whilst certain tools might submit their data to PhishTank too, you can help your fellow web users and fight phishers through submitting data directly to PhishTank.

With a free registered account, reports can be submitted through a web interface or through email. It is extremely easy to send the next phishing attempt that manages to get through your spam filters to PhishTank. Providing you have that email address registered with them, all you have to do it forward it to phish (at) phishtank.com .

Whilst it might not directly benefit you to do so, you are helping users who might help you too. If nothing else, you are keeping your credit card interest rate down marginally, as your bank has to pay less out to compensate phishing victims!

Add Hostname To Firefox Titlebar

Martin Brinkmann — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 20:12:19 +0000

The hostname is basically the root url of a website, for Ghacks it would be www.ghacks.net. Adding that information to the titlebar has two apparent benefits. Number one is related to phishing. Antiphishing measures have been implemented in many web browsers and security software programs which could lead to the assumption that “yet another” way of helping with the identification of phishing sites might be overkill.

Experienced users on the other hand know that no software or script will reach an accuracy of 100%. There will always be false positives and negatives meaning regular websites that are identified as phishing websites (although they are not) and phishing websites that are not identified as such. The latter is obviously more devastating for the user.

Adding the hostname to the titlebar gives the user the opportunity to quickly check if he is on the right website. This in addition to other indicators can aid the user tremendously. More tips can be found at our Phishing Explained article.

There is however another benefit for users who work with password managers like KeePass who make use of the title for identification purposes.

Hostname in Title Bar (via Technix Update) is an experimental Firefox add-on which means that you have to sign in to the Mozilla website before you are allowed to download and install it.