Gentlemen,

I read your recent articles - Mr. McMillan "'Rock Phish' blamed for surge in phishing" and Mr. Osterman "Next up: spoof voicemails?" and it struck me that phishing countermeasures generally consist of attempting to prevent phishing by being aware of its format and then preventing it from entering a system.

While the above may be part of the solution both of your articles pointed me to another solution: counter-Phishing. Counter-Phishing would use fake addresses (email and other), fake bank accounts, fake credit cards, fake social security numbers, etc. After all those phishing want that information to sell to others who will use the information for identity theft and actual theft via the accounts or the fake identity or they will do this themselves.

Imagine you are the criminal element that paid real money for a few hundred accounts/identities/etc and only later found out most of them are not real or at least not what they seemed to be in the first place. Imagine further there are monitors on all of these phish accounts, social security numbers, etc and any activity would put the police on their trail. Depending on what the police are counter-phishing for they can add money to an account, permit limited use of a charge card, etc to further pull the criminal into their various traps. Imagine hundreds or thousands (hundreds of thousands even or maybe even millions) of counter-phish emails, ssn's, cc's, bank accts ... And imagine the buyer of the information will be going back to his supplier for a 'refund'. It would be hilarious!

The best part is the shoe would be on the other foot as the phishers not would have to come up with scheme after scheme to avoid the counter-phish information.

Of course eventually, the will come up with a counter-counter measure where the white hats would then have to come up with counter-counter-counter measures.

I hope I have provided some entertainment for you as Christmas approaches. I want to mention I always look forward to reading your columns in NetWork World.

Cheers & Merry Christmas!

Riley D