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. It’s the first public takedown community that I know of, and we are going to start nailing these sites.
But here’s a little background: A while back, Paul Laudanski and I worked together to shut down a phishing site on a financial services company. What did we do? We called them aggressively by phone. We contacted their ISP. We contacted the brokerage firm they used to clear their orders. In just a few hours, the thing was shut down.
This got us talking about the problem of phishing. Very few people seem to report these phishing sites immediately and get them shut down. There’s a lot of experts involved in phish fighting, but they’re primarily dealing with the important security research and forensics angle of the business.
You can help fight phishers as well, with just a basic knowledge of how the Internet works. If only 10% of the people who read this blog reported one phishing site a day, it would actually make a dramatic impact.

