Comments on: Neighborhood watch for phishing launches

A search is on for volunteers to handle reports of suspected online scams and to help take down fraudulent Web sites.

[Razzl]

The neighbors are deadbeats

Since the very beginning of the phishing phenomenon I've been reporting the fake pages to every real company I could find which was being spoofed. To their credit, eBay and Paypal and Earthlink all made provisions for receiving such information from strangers and processing it. Ominously, the parties least interested in or equipped to handle reports were banks and credit card companies. A couple of the banks had the nerve to reply to me that I should be reporting spoof attacks on them to the FTC directly--as though they had no responsibility or interest in lifting a finger to protect their customers or their reputation! I would suggest reporting all spoof attacks to the business involved and if they ignore you or take no action, send nasty email directly to their ceo. They need to know that spoofs using their name damage their customers and shareholders and they have a fiduciary obligation to take positive action to stop them.

[adaviel]

Spamcop works for us

After we inadvertently hosted a phishing server (hacked machine spoofing 3 laptop addresses)
I was quite impressed by the reports from
SpamCop, which parsed the site URL out of the
spam message and automatically contacted
the site abuse contact

(the site received about 2000 hits and harvested
about 80 credit card numbers, a quarter of them bogus. We got about 40 SpamCop reports plus
mabye a dozen personal ones)

[Iohagh]

Who is checking that the whistle blower is clean

A year ago on the Internet, I read an FBI report on how cyber scammers turned on each other to prove they were good guys as in fact they were merely two doors to the same house of abuse.

Lets say I was about to use an ATM machine and someone said the one over there has been compromised showing me he reported it. I might at first say thanks and then ask him which ones are OK. Ahh there's the trick online.

Crooks can spoof the site of a government agency and create a false sense of trust.

How do I know you are just a good citizen and not someone trying to trick me into trusting you. Yes people should participate but on a reportage level to official or industry reporting authorities but there has to be cross checking since vigilantes are often crooks in disguise.

Or worse, there is a safe door and they advertise by false reportage that the safe door is unsafe keeping people vulnerable to their attacks.

Basically, the day of the Minuteman who heard a horn or a call and ran to the common defense is over. However, the history like in Switzerland where every house is armed is a better metaphor.

If people have a technology or a solution that relies upon their compliance and keeping their PINs and code secrets then that would be perfect wouldn't it. Anyway thats what I think. Ciao now. Janet.

[alek_nedic]

go neighborhood!

http://www.analogstereo.com/vacuum/miele_parquetry.htm