Two wrongs. Or three. Or more?PhishFighting.com says "Just enter the Phishing emails REAL url below and watch as realistic looking, fake, entries are continously sent to the Phishers fake site."
Oh dear. Here we go again fighting abuse with abuse. Two wrongs don't make a right. But wait. There is at least a third wrong here too - sloth.
The poster got here by a simple Google search on "phish emails" and posted the comment on the first and only page he hit. That is at least lazy; there are plenty of other pages here where the comment may have been more fitting to the existing context. So, we see here a hit and run comment spammer to boot.
I did a Google Blog Search to see who else is talking about this and found 5 blogs that mention it. Four of those carry stories along the lines of "tee hee, what a jolly jape - can't wait to try it". One correctly identifies the manifold problems with the approach which in general smacks of unthinking vigilantism.
- Who are we punishing here? Not the phisher certainly. We are simply adding to the existing troubles of some poor sap whose computer has been compromised by malware.
- How much data is already input via phishing sites? Do phishers weed through it all manually or do they have software tools to validate the input? And if the latter, exactly how much inconvenience will they suffer as a result of a few thousand deliberately bogus entries alongside the very many which are accidentally so?
- This one's a doozie - What is phishfighting's "Method One" for retrieving a phishing URL? They say "Simply click on the link and copy the real url from the browser bar". No I didn't make this up. Just how stupid do you have to be knowingly to point a real web browser at a site hosted on a malicious machine?
(Yes, for us advanced users there is the trusty Sam Spade safe browser obviously).
- ... and there is NOTHING on the phishfighting site that teaches users how to report phish sites to ISPs and get them shut down legitimately.
Make that the fourth wrong. The people responsible for PhishFighting are clearly suffering from False Authority Syndrome.
Category: Phish
Technorati: Phish
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