When OpenDNS launched PhishTank four years ago in Oct. 2006, we knew several things:

• We wanted to make a clearinghouse for phishing data.
• We wanted the data to be available for free to other services via an API.
• There was no existing common source of phishing data that was fast-moving, accurate and reliable.

Today I’m excited to announce that the 1 millionth phish has been submitted to PhishTank. The “winning” submission was a fake Citibank UK website, which was quickly verified by the PhishTank community.

Thank you to the thousands of security pros, researchers, academics and concerned Internet users for their contributions to PhishTank. It’s you who have made this possible. You’ve protected tens of millions of people around the world, lending your expertise to help take the guesswork out of identifying phishing scams. It’s a credit to the community that we’ve reached this milestone. And in doing so, we’ve together helped protect not only people who use OpenDNS, but millions more, since the phishing scams reported and verified are also blocked by all of the Internet services PhishTank shares the data with.

As we look toward the next 1 million submissions to PhishTank (happening even more quickly), we know it’s just as important today as it was when we launched in 2006 to ensure that PhishTank continues to be the comprehensive data source companies like Yahoo and Mozilla have come to rely on. The community is an extremely important part of this, so part of recognizing the 1 million phishes milestone is recognizing the people who’ve put in the hard work.

The other part is, of course, the technology that keeps PhishTank running. Over the past two weeks we’ve begun deploying all new hardware for PhishTank’s infrastructure. And, in the coming months, we’ll devote increased engineering resources to it, as well. The goal is that these enhancements and investments will make PhishTank easier to use for the community of dedicated submitters and verifiers, and also faster-moving for the companies and organizations pulling data out.

Did you see anything interesting online last month? Between blog posts, gaming sites, Facebook updates and breaking news, there was a lot to take in. One thing you probably didn’t see — if you are on an OpenDNS-protected network — were Phishing attempts.

Since we block these scammy and fraudulent Web sites, you might not realize how prevalent they are across the Internet. In July alone, we blocked almost one million phishing attempts. That’s how many times people on OpenDNS-protected networks saw the “phishing attempt blocked” page.

Even with the work we do to make sure you’re protected from seeing phishing sites, we can’t always catch everything. If you ever see a Web site or receive an email and aren’t sure if it’s legitimate, we’ve got you covered:

Five Easy Ways to Spot A Phishing Attempt

• Poor resolution: Phishing websites are often poor in quality, since they are created with urgency and have a short lifespan. If the resolution on a logo or in text strikes you as poor, be suspicious.
• Forged URL: Even if a link has a name you recognize somewhere in it, it doesn’t mean it links to the real organization. Read URLs from right to left — the real domain is at the end of the URL. Also, websites where it is safe to enter personal information begin with “https” — the “s” stands for secure. If you don’t see “https” do not proceed. Look out for URLs that begin with an IP address, such as: http://12.34.56.78/firstgenericbank/account-update/ — these are likely phishes.
• Generic greeting: Phishing emails are usually sent in large batches. To save time, Internet criminals use generic names like “First Bank Customer” so they don’t have to type all recipients’ names out and send emails one-by-one.
• Requests personal information: The point of sending phishing email is to trick you into providing your personal information. If you receive an email requesting your personal information, it is probably a phishing attempt.
• Sense of urgency: Internet criminals want you to provide your personal information now. They do this by making you think something has happened that requires you to act fast. The faster they get your information, the faster they can move on to another victim.

As always, we’re going to continue working on finding ways to improve the Internet and make it safer and smarter for our customers. For now, happy [and safe] surfing — and if you have a friend who could use protection from online phishing attempts, let them know about OpenDNS.

This week Facebook recommended OpenDNS on its Security Page, the place Facebook users are encouraged to go to learn how to stay safe on Facebook and on the Internet. OpenDNS is recommended because it takes the guesswork out of identifying phishing scams for you. Even if you click a suspicious link sent to you in a message by your Facebook friend, or posted on your wall, we’ll still prevent you from being fooled by showing you a warning. That’s a lot of incentive to use OpenDNS.

Like other social networks, Facebook seems to be working hard to eliminate phishing on its site. The more popular a site becomes, the more phishers are inclined to use it for phishing and saying Facebook has been gaining in popularity as of late is an understatement.

While Facebook has been growing its global user base we’ve been growing ours, and a big part of the reason people choose OpenDNS is our anti-phishing service. PhishTank.com has identified and verified more than 300,000 individual phishing scams, all of which are blocked for our users.

We’re thrilled Facebook recommends our service.

We just posted PhishTank statistics for April 2008. No major surprises: The United States is, for the thirteenth straight month, hosting more phishes than any other country; A group of large banks, eBay, and PayPal round out the top most spoofed brands; And the PhishTank community of submitters and verifiers continues to have an impressively high accuracy rate.

The headlines tell us the phishers are not giving up. Seemingly every week we see reports of a new type of phishing scam. This week it’s Google AdWords phishing, where AdWords account holders are sent emails alerting them their account needs updating. The account holder logs into the spoofed AdWords interface and hands over their credit card information.

The AdWords phishing scam is interesting to me largely because, in lots of cases, it’s targeting businesses. People understand identity theft. But what happens when a business’s identity is stolen? There’s no easier or more efficient avenue to get reimbursed for a business than for an individual. Basically, whether you represent yourself or your company, you have to go to your credit card company and beg for forgiveness. (Whether or not it should be the banks — some of the most commonly spoofed brands — that are responsible for reimbursing money stolen through phishing is part of a separate debate.)

And the spoofed AdWords account interfaces, at least the ones I’ve seen, are good. I can easily understand how the marketing person tasked with managing AdWords for their company could be fooled. I know plenty of small and mid-size companies that rely on online advertising to drive traffic to their site, and see huge dents in revenue when something goes wrong and the traffic doesn’t come. That marketing person has plenty of incentive to make sure their account information isn’t wrong and nothing is preventing potential customers from seeing their ads.

Experts repeat the same warning about AdWords phishing that we’ve all heard about phishing in general for years: Educate yourself about phishing and look skeptically at URLs. Remember that as a general rule, you won’t be warned via e-mail that your account has been compromised, so if you are ever encouraged via e-mail to login to an account and update information, proceed with caution and look closely at the URL you’re encouraged to click.

Take for example, one of the AdWords phishes someone submitted to PhishTank. See the “d0l9i.cn” in the middle of the URL? If you open a new window and load http://adwords.google.com/select/login, you’ll see the real site’s URL doesn’t include that series of characters. That should be a red flag.

[NOTE: This is a known, verified phishing site. We recommend you do NOT visit it.]

OpenDNS users and users of other services leveraging PhishTank data — McAfee, Opera, Yahoo! Mail, Kaspersky Labs, to name a few — have an extra line of defense when it comes to phishing — they benefit from PhishTank and the wisdom of the community. But it’s abolsutely a good idea to learn to look for inconsistencies in URLs and think twice before providing sensitive information online, whether it’s your own or your company’s.

I’ll keep this one short.

David will be on the radio tonight. Gene Steinberg, the original Tech Night Owl himself, asked David to talk about the first PhishTank annual report.

Who: OpenDNS CEO David Ulevitch

What: Tech Night Owl LIVE with Gene Steinberg

When: 6 p.m. PST to 8 p.m. PST, Thursday, October 18, 2007

Where: www.techbroadcasting.com

How to listen: go to the Web site and turn up your volume.

If you miss the original broadcast, you can listen later.

As we mentioned over on the PhishTank blog, Mozilla, maker of Firefox, announced today it selected PhishTank data as the benchmark for comparing phishing protection in Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7.0. This is a big deal, considering the number of phishing-data sources to choose from.

The results? Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 missed, making it the better of the two at blocking phishing sites, according to third-party evaluator (hired by Mozilla) Smartware.

Check out today’s articles about the testing in Slashdot, SearchSecurity and The Washington Post.

If you’re not a member of the PhishTank community yet, we hope this validation is the motivation you needed.

PhishTank is alive, and filling up.

PhishTank is a community anti-phishing Web site where anyone can go to submit suspected phishes, track the status of their submissions and help verify others’ submissions. Unlike other anti-phishing efforts that may come to mind, PhishTank is totally free to use and open to access.

After a qualified number of users collectively agree that a suspected phish is, in fact, a real phish, the phish becomes verified. (Amit drew the Digg parallel.)

But we didn’t stop there. Because we genuinely want to stop phishing and believe firmly that phishing data should not cost money, PhishTank has a free and open API. Our hope is that developers will use PhishTank data to build anti-phishing elements into their tools.

And you’ve probably guessed by now how OpenDNS uses PhishTank data. Once the PhishTank community collectively verifies a phish, we conduct an additional layer of checks and balances and ultimately block the phish for OpenDNS users (if the users have phishing protection enabled, of course). We still get phishing data from other sources, too, but we think you’re going to help make PhishTank our best source.

We want OpenDNS to be the best it can possibly be, and in order for that to happen we need the best phishing data available. But we’re not selfish — the data belongs to all of us.

Read more about PhishTank here and let us know what you think!

Update: While we encourage people to write code using the PhishTank API, this specific offer is no longer valid.

We’re looking for someone to write some sample (but working) code to help test an anti-phishing database API we’ve developed and are about to release for public use (for free!). We are busy working on a ton of projects right now and rather than divert our attention to writing plugins and extensions for apps we aren’t familiar with we figured we could pay one or two of you to do it for us instead. The code will be licensed under an open-source approved license, probably the Mozilla license, or something even more open. We basically just want our API to have some example implementations when we launch it next week.

Here’s the problem: time is of the essence! We want to have something ready to go public October 2nd, which means we really want to see a test version by Friday, September 29th. This will give us enough time to work out any bugs (in your code or our API) by the morning of Monday, October 2nd. That’s only a week from today (yikes!).

I want to offer some good incentives for you, especially since time is short. Feel free to pick some or all of the following:

• $300 for a Thunderbird extension which scans an email for URLs and checks them against our API and optionally submits suspected URLs from phishing emails into our API.
• $100 for a SpamAssassin plugin which just scans an email for URLs and checks them against our API
• $100 for another equally as cool open source project like Squid Cache, per our approval via email.
• A free lunch w/ our CEO at a good restaurant if you’re willing to come into San Francisco to have it. Our CEO (me) has good taste and gets to decide what a ‘good restaurant’ is, but it’ll be good.
• A blog post saying how much you rock.
• If you really are good, we are hiring and this is a fast-track way to get through the interview process.

Since you will be one of the first to use our API it might require some back and forth with us as we tune our API. It would help if you used Yahoo IM or AIM and spoke English. Other than that, we are pretty flexible about who you are. We posted a listing at RentACoder for a Thunderbird hacker but haven’t had any bites yet which is why we’re posting here. Unless you hear from us directly (John Roberts or myself) that you are hired, we make no guarantees.

You can post general questions here on the blog but specific questions should be sent to us via email (firstname at opendns dot com will get to John or myself).