AOL Fights Phishing

Posted by Ken

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The longtime ISP provider, AOL, has launched an attack against phishing scams. Phishing, also known as pharming, is the act of showing you a Web site that looks like it’s from a company you know, but isn’t. The purpose of this is to get you (the customer) to enter your logon or other personal information. So let’s say you do business with Citibank and you receive an e-mail from them. The message instructs you to go to “their” Web site where you are asked to confirm something about your records, or the like. Once they get your information, the door is wide open for them to do all sorts of nasty things.

AOL’s approach is to block known offenders from ever entering their universe at all. Compared to other ISPs like Earthlink where they give the customer a way to block or override such sites themselves, this is a pretty bold move, but one that I still think is a good idea.

Blocking the baddies is the easy part. The hard part is keeping up with the new ones. Reputable hosting companies will usually shut down these guys, but by the time they do, the phishers are already moving on to the next host to spread their bad karma somewhere else.

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Scams