New Anti-Phishing Tool Puts Monkey-Wrench Into the Practice

Monkeyspaw, the new antiphishing tooL for security professionals, uses the Greasemonkey extension capability from Firefox. Once installed in the Firefox browser, Monkeyspaw gathers detailed information about the IP address and DNS host of Web sites, displays HTTP server headers and can be customized and enhanced by the user community.

Monkeyspaw can automatically submit suspect sites to the Phishing Incident Reporting and Termination (PIRT) Squad, which attempts to take down fraudulent Web sites. You can find it at planb-security.net/ userscripts/monkeyspaw-howto.html. The tool comes at a good time: Industry consortium Anti-Phishing Workgroup tracked more than 10,000 unique phishing sites in August 2006. --Andrew Conry-Murray, [email protected]