Go Daddy Implements Protection Against Phishing Attacks

Tuesday, August 16, 2005

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The Go Daddy Group, Inc., parent company of GoDaddy.com, has announced that it has implemented additional protection from Internet "phishing" attacks, with its state-of-the-art implementation of Netcraft's phishing site feed.

Phishing attacks use a combination of deceptive emails and web sites to impersonate banks and e-commerce companies, thereby tricking consumers into providing critical personal information (such as passwords), which enable phishers to steal money and facilitate identity theft.

The additional protection gained by implementing Netcraft's phishing feed augments existing Go Daddy tools which thwart phishing (and spam), and will cover approximately 1.6 million Go Daddy email customers. Go Daddy currently utilizes three separate tools for determining whether any of the approximately 20 million emails it receives daily are phishing emails. First, it utilizes its own proprietary algorithm to scan the content of incoming emails; those which are identified as phishing are deleted immediately, and not even delivered to the recipient's email box. Second, Go Daddy references Sender Policy Framework records to verify that an incoming email was sent from a server which the sender has identified as being a legitimate server. (If the email is coming from a server which hasn't been identified by the sender, then the email is highly suspect). Third, links contained in inbound emails are cross-checked against several lists which identify phishers (and spammers). If the link is identified on any of the lists as being associated with a phisher (or spammer), the email is not delivered. Now, with its implementation of Netcraft's phishing feed, Go Daddy's email system has yet another tool in the fight against phishing. Inbound emails containing links are now cross-checked against Netcraft's phishing feed; if the link is identified as being associated with phishing, it is not delivered.

Netcraft's phishing feed is a continuously updated, encrypted database of patterns that match phishing URLs reported by the Netcraft Toolbar community, and validated by Netcraft staff. It can be integrated with mail servers to prevent customers from receiving emails that contain phishing URLs, or with a web proxy server to deny access when a phishing URL is visited.

Accompanying alerts allow Go Daddy to promptly investigate and shut down phishing sites found to be using Go Daddy's infrastructure, or any of the more than 9 million domains registered through Go Daddy Group's three ICANN-accredited registrar companies.