On Tuesday, January 30, I’ll be representing PhishTank on a panel about Sharing Phishing Data at the Messaging Anti-Abuse Working Group (aka MAAWG) meeting in San Francisco, California, USA. I know at least one PhishTank member, spamfighter, will be at the meeting. In fact, he’s on the same panel, as part of his “day job.”

I’ll be talking about how PhishTank works, how the data gets used, where it gets shared, and where we hope the community will lead us. If you’re using the data and we haven’t heard from you, I’d love to know about it before Tuesday. More examples help reinforce the success.

The audience is commercial and non-commercial members of the anti-abuse community, focused on email concerns. My goal, beyond raising awareness of PhishTank and participating in a lively panel discussion, is to encourage more organizations to use the data and consider ways they can contribute.

If anyone else from the PhishTank community will be attending the meeting, please introduce yourself. I’d like to thank you in person for your help.

Kelly Jackson-Higgins, the always-informed writer at Dark Reading, caught David’s blog post yesterday and wrote an article about PhishTank’s new direction. The gist: Your opportunity is here. If you want to be a part of the PhishTank team, act now.

Take it from me, there is very cool stuff going on at the Tank. This is the first opportunity extended for people to join the team. Look over David’s criteria and if you meet them, send an email to support [at] PhishTank.com. Tell us what you’ve done and why PhishTank would be better with you at the helm.

All of us at OpenDNS are thrilled with PhishTank. Over the last couple weeks usage has really soared and PhishTank is unquestionably the most groundbreaking and innovative anti-phishing site on the Internet. You all have helped show that a community of active participants are far more effective than any single monolithic company could ever be in creating a clearinghouse of phishing information.

Now it’s time to step it up.

Our goal has always been to create involvement with the community beyond just submitting and verifying phishes. We have a growing team of users, developers, and moderators who talk on mailing lists and discuss ways of improving PhishTank. Now it’s time to turn some of this energy into action. We don’t want PhishTank to just be a community-visited effort. We want PhishTank to be a community-led and community-run effort.

We’re looking for some people who want to spend some development cycles (PHP and MySQL) helping to improve PhishTank and drive new features. We can help with the feature ideas, but if you have some of your own, that’s both awesome and even better.

I could list a hundred reasons why working on PhishTank would be a really good opportunity. Here’s a few:

1. Working on PhishTank lets you have a big impact on a serious issue. You shape the future of PhishTank when you get involved.
2. PhishTank gets a lot of exposure most projects don’t have which means your efforts will be seen by many people.
3. Being a PhishTank developer lets you see how a community-run site actually operates and grows.
4. For students, you might be able to work on PhishTank for course credit at your school or university. We’re happy to supervise a project.
5. Working on a project like PhishTank can be a great resume booster.
6. Saying you help keep the Internet safe at night is a really good line to use when you have to impress someone. Trust me.

One of the best parts about PhishTank is that you can learn and be active in more than just technology. You will also see the other critical pieces that are required to make it a great site. For example: working with journalists and educating law enforcement are just some of the things that go on at PhishTank. If have a technical background but you want to do more, PhishTank is a great place to broaden your knowledge. We still need the tech help though, so read below and see if you might be qualified.

Here’s what we’re looking for:

• Volunteers with at least some experience with PHP and MySQL.
• People who are able to not just say they want to help out, but actually can and will help out.
• Individuals who are willing to step up and make things happen. We don’t want someone to complain about the lack of forums on the site. We want someone who says, “I’ll set up forums on the site!”
• Familiarity with Linux is a requirement but you don’t need to be some kind of über-sysadmin.

If you are interested in getting involved, send an email to support [at] phishtank.com with some information about yourself (your background, coding experience, etc) and a brief note about why you want to get involved in PhishTank and what you would be most interested in doing.

Thanks!

Happy New Year! December statistics are now ready for your viewing pleasure.

Highlights include:

• Total number of votes by the PhishTank community: 94,526
• Total number of unique, suspected phishing scams reported: 20,352
• Country hosting the most phishing sites: United States
• Percentage of phishing sites hosted in United States: 23
• Median time it took for the PhishTank community to verify phishes: 15 hours, 16 minutes

The Tank was a bit slower to verify this month, but that’s probably because of the holidays. And the two dips in verification - on December 9 and December 15 - were due to maintenence.

Enjoy!