Friedbeef’s Tech

Do you ever get those annoying ‘PayPal’ e-mails requesting account information or a credit card number? Most people just glance over them and delete them. However, there are still many in the world who cannot differentiate these ill-intentioned e-mails from genuine mail, and naively enter their account information. It’s really unfortunate.

This illegal, ill-willed tactic is called ‘phishing’. Cyber-thieves send out millions of fake e-mails seemingly from PayPal (or a financial institution, etc..) in an attempt to con the recipient into entering personal and financial account information on the cloned destination site. Most can spot these from a mile away, but many non-techies and newbies have trouble distinguishing genuine corporate e-mail from a cleverly disguised phishing campaign.

But one website is fighting back. It’s called PhishTank. Visitors can do one of two things. They can either submit a suspected phishing link or check to see if a given link is genuine or a phish.

The site launched in October. Since then, over 50,000 suspected phishes have been submitted by over 9,000 users. Pretty respectable stats.

To track the progress of the site, be sure to visit the PhishTank blog. There is also a PhishTank API.

This an excellent example of how the web 2.0 trend of user participation and contribution can aide in the fight against an unworthy case, in this case phishing. It will be interesting to see how other new web trends and technologies will be used in the fight against cyber-crime and mischievous behavior.

Kudos to PhishTank.

This post was contributed by Aidan Henry, an Internet strategy and marketing consultant from Victoria, Canada. For more brilliant commentary on the Web 2.0 scene, please visit his site at MappingTheWeb.com – a 9Rules blog.