Yahoo! Mail Integrates PhishTank Data for Better Protection

Yahoo! has added PhishTank as an additional source of data to help protect Yahoo! Mail users against online fraud.

Launched in October 2006 by DNS solution provider OpenDNS, PhishTank is a community project that lets people submit links to potential phishing sites so that other users can then inspect those sites. After inspection, users can vote whether they think the site really is a phishing scam. The data is then used to help protect others from falling victim to the scams. PhishTank makes its data available online at http://www.phishtank.com/ and through an API for anyone that wants to use it.

"By combining the data received from PhishTank.com with other antiphishing resources, we are currently protecting Yahoo! Mail users from nearly 14 million phishing email messages per day," said Miles Libbey, Yahoo! antispam product manager.

According to a report published by PhishTank, the organization recorded 10,515 phishing scams in March 2007 alone. Nine of the top 10 phishing sites used domains registered in Hong Kong (.hk), and the most targeted companies for fraud were PayPal, eBay, Bank of America, Barclays Bank, Branch Banking and Trust Company, US Bank, Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase, Wachovia, and Capital One--in that order.