CastleCops Phish Fighters Close Site

Quietly, just before Christmas, six year old volunteer anti-phishing group CastleCops closed its Web site, noting in an open letter that "all things come to an end." True enough, but the example CastleCops set deserves to live on, and be emulated.The CastleCops farewell letter is brief, simple, even modest, thanking people for their support, promising to forward unused donations to the Internet Systems Consortium, and then goodbye.

A quiet ending to an endeavor hat earned plenty of praise from the security community over the years.

CastleCop's commitment to sharing information, as well as its creation of the Phishing Incident Response Team, which shared phishing data with law enforcement agencies, headed off, by some estimates, tens of millions of dollars in fraudulent credit card scams, as well as successful prosecutions of attackers.

The openness of their approach also made CastleCops a target, the focus of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks as well as phony donations made by cybercrooks with stolen credit cards.

While no reason was given on the site for the organization's closing, its database of malware has been moved to Systemlookup.com.

As the New Year approaches, a moment's auld lang syne for CastleCops and the good work it did is more than appropriate.

Thanks.