New: Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination Squad
http://wiki.castlecops.com/PIRT
"...CastleCops and Sunbelt Software are announcing a new anti-phishing community, the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination (PIRT) Squad. This will be a community at CastleCops solely dedicated to taking down phishing sites..."
I understand the desire and sentiment, but its going to be heavy going for PIRT and the handlers they choose. I've seen some interesting public statistics at the Antiphishing Working Group and private statistics elsewhere that reflect some pretty scary numbers...For example, in the APWG January report it notes that it received over 17,877 *unique* phishing reports just in that one month.
PIRT is calling for around 50 handlers (obviously from around the world) to review new submissions on a 24/7 global basis. Can 50 or so handlers manage with that sort of volume? Assuming a 30 day month, that's 11 reports per handler per day.
The number of new phishing sites has more than doubled since November last year.
New phishing sites by month:
November - 4630
December - 7197
January - 9715
A multi-layer collaborative approach is very effective. I'm hoping the data is shared not just with the "appropriate authorities" (law enforcement?) but also with Microsoft and other groups that are fighting the phishers by offering detection and blocking of same.