How to Report and Block a Phishing Website?

Phrased on the word fishing, it means the way emails and websites trick you into giving away your personal and financial information like Banking Passwords, address, mobile numbers etc. This happens in several ways. A very innocent looking email which looks very much like it was sent from your bank or credit card company can lead you into giving away the login and password information on a website which resembles the original one in all ways.

Take a look at how phishing websites look so close to the targeted genuine website.

Here is the genuine website:

And here is the phishing website which differs only in the URL:

How to identify Phishing?

Phishing emails generally ask you to give or update your personal details by portraying as a genuine bank emails. They are beautifully crafted to look as good as a original one. Take a look at a example phishing email sent in the name of IDBI Bank Customer Care.

One way to identify such emails is to take a look at the actual url pointed to by any website links in the text of the email. For example, the link www.idbi.com is actually linked to http://1010mainst.com/index.htm. www.idbi.com is a original banking website; http://1010mainst.com/index.htm being duplicate one. A phishing link is disguised in the form of a genuine url.

How to report a Phishing Site and get it blocked?

Go to www.phishtank.com and register in it for free.
Submit the Phishing Site URL over there.

Our Submission of the Phishing site to PhishTank can be seen in the image above.

Most of the latest browsers including Firefox, Chrome, and Opera gather information from websites like PhishTank and block such phishing websites by giving a warning like the one from Firefox 3.5 below. After reporting to PhishTank, it took few hours for Firefox, Chrome and Opera to show ‘Web Forgery’ warning.

How to Report a Unsafe Website using SmartScreen Filter Feature in Internet Explorer 8?

Internet Explorer 8 provides an option to report such a phishing website directly from the browser without going to any external websites. In order to report a unsafe website,
1. Open the phishing website in Internet Explorer.
2. Report the website by clicking Safety –> SmartScreen Filter –> Report Unsafe website.
 



A drawback of IE is that it has it’s own phishing site information collection and does not seem to update from websites like PhishTank. Our submission to PhishTank did not make any difference to IE which continued to show the website without any warning.

A few hours after submission to PhishTank, the phishing website was no longer found!

Have you come across any such Phishing website?