Phishing is a common technique, used by spammers, and criminals alike. The most common way of stealing information through the Internet, now has a new enemy. The social networking mega power, Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), has introduced a new tool for users to utilize, in order to prevent phishing.
Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) has been able to do a pretty good job of keeping users secured when they are on the site, but they have had no way to protect them on other sites. That has all been changed with the introduction of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB)’s new anti-phishing email.The new email, [email protected], has been set up for users to forward emails which they suspect to be attempts at phishing to.
Once the emails are received, a team of Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB) professionals will analyze the message, seek out its origin, and evaluate the risk it poses to the user. If it is in fact, found to be malicious, Facebook will then send the URL which generated the message to browser makers and search engines, in hopes that the site will be blacklisted. Mark Hammel, a Facebook engineer, and malware researcher, is quoted by money.cnn.com as saying, “We have a pretty robust team here to seal with bad actors, this will give us extra visibility into people’s email inboxes, where there wasn’t a good feedback mechanism in place.”
The problem with phishers is that they are very hard to catch. They have very refined techniques of switching URLs, in order to prevent blacklisting and other action against them. The Anti-Phishing Working Group’s biannual report shows that they were tracking almost 57,000 suspected phishing sites.
So, how does this benefit you? When you get an email, which you think may be an attempt to gather your information, forward it to Facebook’s anti phishing email, and let them analyze it. It could save you both money and a major headache, as phishing is the number one method of attack on PCs.
