Gary Warner, a steadfast volunteer who works on PIRT (the all-volunteer antiphishing group I started with Paul and Robin Laudanski), has some news to share of how well it’s going. It’s just incredible what’s happening out there — PIRT is really making a difference.
From an email from Gary:
Every day the PIRT Squad receives dozens of thank you notes from Brand Owners, Web Masters, and Network Owners, thanking us for letting them know about the Phish we have reported to them.
Do you know that NetCraft, who has an Anti-Phishing Toolbar used by tens of thousands of people to help protect themselves from phishing sites, says our team is #1 at reporting phish? This month we have notified them of 631 phishing sites that they have confirmed themselves to be phish. That is more than 40% of all the phishing sites confirmed by NetCraft for the month! (In May, we reported 1593 phishing URLs to them that they confirmed we were the FIRST anti-phishers to report!)
May was an INCREDIBLE month for PIRT. We produced 1143 separate PIRT reports on 1190 brand attacks against 90 different brands!
The PIRT Squad also went out of their way to help Companies, Churches, Governments, Schools, and even a Motorcycle Gang remove the phishing sites from their webservers and, in many cases, determine what vulnerabilities were used to place the files there originally so they could apply appropriate patches.
Every day the PIRT Squad recovers “Phishing Kits” and “Drop Email Addresses” through the cooperation of webmasters and network owners where we send reports. We share these files with our contact at the FBI.
You can find out more about PIRT here. Join up, help us out. It feels darned good to take down these sites.
Alex Eckelberry