The PhishTank Story

Once upon a time there was a nasty cyber crime called Phishing. Phishers all over the world sat in front of their computer screens, faces illuminated by the LCD glow, stealing your grandmother's personal information from the comfort of their own homes. No one was safe. It was horrible.

How could this be happening, people wondered. Why doesn't someone stop the phishers, they asked. But phishing continued. Someone even said that phishing - the crime - was a multi-million dollar industry.

One day the good people at OpenDNS decided they'd had enough, so they put their heads together and came up with a plan. They'd create a place where people could submit phishing e-mails and Web sites. But this place would be different from the other anti-phishing places. This one would be totally open and even have a free API, where developers could use PhishTank's community data to integrate ant-phishing elements into their applications.

So the OpenDNS team got to work, often staying late into the night and missing their favorite TV shows. But they were on a mission. A mission to stop phishing. A mission called PhishTank.

When PhishTank finally opened up to the public, the response was better then they ever could have imagined. People danced and cheered, "hooray for PhishTank, hooray for PhishTank," they shouted.

Slowly, phishing started to go away and people started to notice. Sometimes, when people wanted to submit phishes to PhishTank - wanted to help clean up the Net - they looked through their spam folders and couldn't even find one. PhishTank really worked. And alas, one day, the OpenDNS team realized. Phishing was gone.

The end.

(This is the story we hope to tell someday. Thanks for helping make phishing history.)