Phish down – finally
Finally, I just checked and ~80 hours since my first emails the Bank of the West phishing site is finally down. (~32 hours since contacting the ISP and 8-10 hours since contacting Bank of the West.) I suspect the ISP probably is the one responsible as I’ve found 24-48 hour response time for ISP’s with virus complaints. (Note to self, first round of complaints should probably go to ALL contacts that might be directly responsible, domain owners, ISP and even spoofed company.) I hate that it took so long, but I’m glad that it’s down. I feel like I actually have accomplished something with all the time I’ve spent on it this week.
The thing that is a bit depressing is what it took to get one site shut down that was illegaly harvesting peoples account information. I’ve sent now a total of 4 seperate emails, spent probably an hour investigating who to contact, etc. So, all told, maybe have 3 hours of time invested getting one site shut down. The phishing site was in a subdirectory at http://www.syncit.com.au I have no bad feelings for passing along where it was as the phishing directories no longer exist. Given that their main site is still up, it does make me suspect they finally cleaned it up. I do wonder if their ISP contacted them and gave a bit of extra “incentive” along the lines of “clean it up or we’ll cut your connection until it’s gone.” It appeared as though their site had been hacked, possibly through some sort of PHP vulnerability.
I know spamcop has a fairly automated method of scanning email and sending complaints to the appropriate abuse admins. I haven’t seen how effective that may be. (Do they pay as much attention to an automated complaint as a personally written complaint?) There has to be an easier way to get action though. The FBI fraud complaint site was the one that really got me thinking there must be a better way. I felt like I would need to supply a blood sample to pass along the info.
Maybe it’s time for a good long google on the subject.