AOL Goes On Anti-Phishing Offense

America Online is taking extra measures in order to battle the growing problem of phishing attacks on its users, inking two new partnerships and expanding another. The nation's largest ISP says it currently blocks 8 million phishing attempts each day and will now actively seek out potential scams before they become a problem.

Working with MarkMonitor and Cyveillance, AOL will keep track of newly registered domains and see if they mimic legitimate sites. The company will also crawl the Web looking for phishing sites and work with Internet providers to take them offline.

"The only difference between a phisher and a mugger is that a phisher uses a keyboard and not a gun," said Tatiana Platt, AOL Senior Vice President and Chief Trust Officer.

"Phishing and identity theft crimes cost consumers billions of dollars each year, and we will do everything in our power to protect our members from the online criminals who would prey on them."

In addition to proactively working to shut down phishing scams before they reach customers, AOL says it is analyzing more than a million suspicious URLs referred by AOL members each day. Those sites deemed questionable will be blocked from the service.

Although such steps primarily impact AOL members, company spokesperson Andrew Weinstein says they also benefit Web users at large. Beyond helping to shut down phishers running scams, AOL's partners use their lists of known phishing sites for multiple other clients as well.