Phisher

This is a placeholder for the Phisher project. Everything here may move.

Summary

Phisher is a SpamAssassin plugin which looks for anchors whose text resembles a domain name but whose href does not match the text.

For example, these would be caught:

The function also does some normalization of urls and domains, so some similar matches should not be caught. For example:

Downloading

Phisher.pm

Feeble instructions for using it are in the header. If you are not comfortable screwing around with your SA config, or if you do not have access to the site-wide config files (local.cf), you probably won’t be able to use this yet.

Why This Is A Bad Idea

This approach has been suggested before, usually as a regexp. Some people don’t like the general approach because it can lead to false positives:

My opinion is that this is more a matter of setting appropriate scores, and letting the presence of the mismatched anchor inform SA, than a matter of not wanting to use it because it might be wrong (as, in fact, many SA rules FP all the time). Further, I think you can’t implement this as a single line regexp because the string normalization becomes too hairy, and the pattern will break down all over the place. I tried it that way at first and it was a mess.

To Do