EarthLink Taps Cyota for Phishing Site Intelligence

Internet service provider EarthLink Inc. will partner with anti-fraud vendor Cyota to improve EarthLinks ScamBlocker anti-phishing program, the companies said Monday.

EarthLink will incorporate data from Cyotas FraudAction anti-phishing service into ScamBlocker. The partnership will allow EarthLink to block access to phishing sites for its users, preventing them from being victimized by phishers, said Naftali Bennett, CEO of Cyota.

Researchers from the Honeynet Project find that phishers are getting more sophisticated. Click here to read more.

Cyota, based in New York, makes a range of anti-fraud products for financial institutions, including Bank of America, Chase and Capital One, Bennett said. Cyota maintains an Anti-Fraud Command Center that monitors the Web for phishing Web sites using an automated risk analysis engine technology on behalf of those banks.

The company alerts banks when it spots a phishing Web site that targets their customers, then communicates with the ISP hosting the Web site to have it shut down, and begins a forensic investigation to determine the source of the site, Bennett said.

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As part of its agreement with EarthLink, Cyota will update EarthLink once a phishing attack against a financial institution is detected. EarthLink will then block customers access to that Web site, he said.

Statistics compiled by Cyota indicate that phishing has grown by 4,000 percent in the last 18 months, with more than 2,500 new phishing scams introduced each month, Cyota said.

The announcement from EarthLink follows a similar one from America Online Inc. in April.

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