Internet Security Firm Offers Anti-Phishing Service
By Larry Seltzer
January 5, 2004

Internet services firm Netcraft, most famous for its survey of Web server software usage, has announced a service mainly for banks and other financial organizations to track use of their name, brands, trademarks and slogans on the Internet. The service is intended to detect and facilitate quick removal of attempts at fraud, identity theft and other phishing attacks.

In addition to leveraging the data from its monthly surveys, including home page data from almost 20 million sites, the service will include real-time monitoring of spam for domains, brands and company names. Bath, England-based Netcraft will also monitor DNS registrations and SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) certificate common names.

Clients will receive details of the site registration and hosting locations of potentially offending sites, as well as classification of the severity of the incident. Netcraft will review site content manually in order to give a proper classification.

While the focus of the service is on financial organizations, it should apply to any commercial organization that is subject to phishing-style attacks. The same techniques allow Netcraft to offer monitoring for non-phishing trademark infringement.


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