Focus On: Phishing

The death of the Blue Frog anti-spam client has mobilized a small group of developers to rethink Blue Security's concept. Not the tit-for-tat spam opt-out methods, mind you. The network architecture. Developers suggest that, if Blue Security had built a distributed P2P network, it could have withstood the type of attack that brought it down, along with Prolexis, Tucows, Typepad and UltraDNS. After looking over the plans, Email Battles offers a few suggestions.

Jayson Harris was the irritant that helped mold the legal approach now commonly used by Microsoft's crack Internet Safety Enforcement Team. In fact, he's logged two firsts: The Harris case is the first civil case filed by Microsoft related to phishing, and the biggest phishing case in Iowa's history. Microsoft actually calls him the "MSN Billing Phisher." So why the short sentence and puny fine?

Every day, it seems, some security company or industry anti-phishing coalition is grinding out a press release either extolling the virtues of its solution, or gloomily predicting the demise of Western civilization... or at least the Internet... due to phishing. But while experts cluck about phishing, users are still more concerned over a spam problem that is either too hot, too cold, or just about right. Depends on how you look at it.

In the rosy scenario provided by SSL Certificate Authorities, users would be instantly warned off when a web site contained no certification that verified its authenticity. Thus, the anti-phishing toolbar would protect the unwary from the moral turpitudes of predators. In practice, however, researchers have found that anti-phishing toolbars for web browsers that depend on verification of SSL certificates are the least likely of all to stop phishing. Email Battles explains why.

If you believed you had been wrongfully accused of phishing, how long would it take you to respond? A day? A week? How about four-and-a-half months? That's the elapsed time between Email Battles' tracking of a phishing scam to a Norwegian website, and the owner's complaint. In the interest of fairness, EB quickly followed-up. The errant website owner's failure to respond in kind may lead reasonable people to question his veracity.