Backed by one of the largest corporations on Internet, Julian Field, Systems Administrator at the University of Southampton's School of Electronics and Computer Science, has launched ScamNailer, a programme designed purely to spot phishing attacks. Earlier, in 2000, the same developer had developed MailScanner, which has become a world-leading email protection system, capable of supporting more virus scanning engines than any other with over 1.3 million downloads. MailScanner also recently celebrated its 10th anniversary on 1st of May.
The programme, which can be downloaded for free, tackles spear-phishing, a technique used by spammers and scammers to try to get an individual’s username and password, so that they can then send out millions of spam messages from their email address. ScamNailer has compiled two lists of addresses which are commonly used in phishing attacks and from these it generates a set of SpamAssassin rules that detect the presence of these addresses, which can be used in MailScanner or SpamAssassin to stop the spear-phishing attacks completely.
"The advantage that ScamNailer has over any similar programmes is that its backer has provided access to a list of phishing email addresses and websites much larger than any other available, so when people download the package, they can block these addresses from their own site," said Julian.
