Taking the phish out of water

April 15, 2004

It was bound to happen. Earthlink has announced their new anti-phishing product called ScamBlocker, and they are making it available to all for free.

Phishing is a technique used by hackers in which a spam sent to users contains links to fraudulent sites mimicking authentic sites such as ebay, paypal, or citibank. Statistically speaking, a percentage of the recipients would have accounts with those firms, and a sub-percentage of this group would fall for the con and submit their private data on the fake site. The data, of course, will be immediately sent to the evil scammers who will use it in a any number of ways to profit from.

There is a good reason why earthlink has decided to make ScamBlocker free. ScamBlocker would harness the collective voting muscle of all the surfers who would report phishing sites back to the ScamBlocker servers. In doing so they save future victims of the scam from being duped. If ScamBlocker detects a user visiting a reported phish site, it would redirect the user to an earthlink warning page, alerting the user of the potential danger.

The jury is still out on whether this system will thwart most phishing scams, but as most things go, it’s a start and it’s better than nothing.

Go here for more info.