Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination Squad Announced
by Chris Boyd, Wayne Porter
New Anti-Phishing Task Force Announced
A new anti-phishing community is in the process of being created, thanks to Castlecops.com and Sunbelt Software in a joint effort looking to take down phishing sites by aggressively pursuing them until an ISP / compromised site owner take action. From the press release:
The task force, called the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination (PIRT) Squad, is a community at CastleCops solely dedicated to taking down phishing sites. The community consists of members who report new phishing scams as well as highly experienced security researchers ("handlers") that handle incoming reports of phishing websites and are responsible for performing immediate action to terminate the criminal activity.
The PIRT Squad works as a complement to existing organizations such as the Anti-Phishing Working Group (APWG). The primary difference between PIRT and other organizations is that PIRT is focused solely on aggressively terminating phishing sites. PIRT will work with other security organizations and, if necessary, law enforcement, to provide information for security and forensic analysis.
"The reason this group was formed is to give consumers direct access to a dedicated task force that will take immediate and aggressive action to shutting down phishing sites," said Paul Laudanski, president of CastleCops.
The interesting thing here is that the community will be able to tackle areas of Phishing that dedicated, commercial groups previously did not touch - such as small banks, compromised personal websites and other favourite targets for small-time phishers and keylogging groups. Areas that used to "fall through the cracks" will now (hopefully) have a greatly increased hit-rate, as far as taking down the bad guys goes.
How to report a Phisher
Users can go to www.castlecops.com/pirt to submit a phish through a web-based system, or by email to pirt@castlecops.com.
This article is copyright 2005 by XBlock.com.
It may not be reprinted or copied without the express written consent of the author.
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