Introducing the first PhishTank moderators
posted by John Roberts on November 23rd, 2006 in Community, Moderators, PhishTank
You may have noticed that problem submissions are getting resolved and addressed faster than ever. The credit goes, in large part, to a volunteer team which has been quietly contributing for a few weeks now: the PhishTank moderators. I’ve been remiss in calling attention to their additional efforts, so I wanted to wish every member of the community an American “Happy Thanksgiving” and give a public shout out to these moderators. They’ve made our job (as PhishTank administrators) much, much easier.
The first PhishTank moderators
Simurgh, clubjuggle, funchords, micha, Sedna, spamfighter, and Chris1948 are all on the job.
Moderators are noted as such on their public user page.
More information
All of the PhishTank moderators are volunteers. In fact, all of them were asked to participate, and they kindly agreed. There is no set commitment of time or energy, just a sense of stewardship and a willingness to help make the site and community work better.
Moderators have the following extra actions available to them on the site:
- Ability to mark a submission ONLINE or Offline.
- Ability to change the selected phish URL being voted on for a submission.
- Ability to see and resolve the “flags” that any community members can set, whether for ONLINE/Offline status or screenshots or other concerns.
- Ability to scan an admin page to see which submissions have the most “flags.”
These functions are to complement and correct where software is led astray, mostly.
Problems with PhishTank are not the fault of moderators. Keep speaking up about how we can improve… the moderators certainly are, and we welcome the feedback and the energy. Note: We’re not seeking out extra moderators, but we don’t have a limit or a quota.
Be sure that we won’t stop asking for help!
ps – Added Char on November 29, 2006.
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I need some info about “attacking” these phishers. Anyone have any techniques ?
Congrats to the new moderators!
You’re doing a great job!
Congratulations to the moderators – we salute you! Many thanks for your contributions so far and your willingness to go beyond what you’ve done already, to help the rest of us.
Here is perfect example why moderators are needed. It also shows the “poor hacked webserver” story is generally a lie.
gitiks.ws entries show a fraud “mortgage” in screenshot tab (funchords submissions), when you check site in frame, they are indeed phishing pages.
I think it is time to use mod powers
Gary, these people are criminals. They use hi tech (?) but they are not different from ordinary criminals. You should not deal with them directly.
Best thing you can do is asking your bank/organisation to check phishtank.com to see open data which would cost them millions dollars worth of customer trust. I have personally mailed an American bank asking about a single website hosted 20-30 phishing pages which targets them and if they are aware of the phishtank offering the data free of charge.
Also majority of those URLs you see are hacked websites, they have no clue (generally) that the pages exist there, “attacking” them could mean attacking a k12 website or a very critical website.
If you want to do something about the phishing mails you get, there is http://www.spamcop.net , it will also report the phishing site, if you reference your phish report URL as “additional comment” to HOSTING PROVIDER of phish domain (not the spammers ISP), you can get it taken down very quick.
Be clear like “phishing site up and running, see (phishtank url showing the phish)”
Please note, Spamcop.COM has nothing to do with Spamcop.net and believed to be run by spammers themselves.
I wanted to let people know that Char is also now a moderator. Welcome, and thanks.
Gary,
Google “London Antiphishing Society” and read up on how to gum up phisher’s dirty deeds.
So, is it strictly a ‘don’t call us, we’ll call you’ arrangement for appointments of new moderators, or can people apply to line up for approval to moderator status? I’d very much like to donate some of my free time to sifting through submissions, tidying up and so forth, I was one of the earliest members to sign up and I’ve always thought sites such as this are a great idea. I’m all for the idea, the principle and the community-based submissions, and I’d love to do my bit in return, but there doesn’t seem to be any way to give that little bit more aside from going through all the recently-submitteds and clicking ‘Is’ or ‘Is Not’.
Anybody have any light they’d care to shed on this subject?
Christopher, and others: Mike and I are working on more explicit way of asking for help. We definitely want to encourage and enable all interested parties who’ve demonstrated their effectiveness (as you have) to pitch in multiple ways (if you want!).
All the current moderators were asked, based on activity on the site and some additional queries and other indicators of interest along the way. There is no quota or limit, and no slight intended for those who are making PhishTank work without acting as moderators — voting and submitting are critical engines of the site!
More soon.