Is Google a feasible tool for an organization to check if their name is being used in phishing sites?

Question

Is it feasible for an organization to use Google and the available Google search operators (e.g. allinurl, etc) to find out if their organization name is being spoofed or used in phishing sites and then subsequently report them to relevant authorities such as CERT?

Are there any other better solution than this?

Answer 1

You can try to take the best out of Google to find out if your organization is having a phishing sibling, but it won't probably show you all the phishing websites.

If a take the allinurl example, and you're looking for similar website as paypal, if the attacker choose a name like paypall or paypol, this won't be seen in the Google result page. Now, this can pop up some good one, as you can see on this interesting link (that answer a bit of your question too).

You will have more success searching with the intitle parameter, like : https://www.google.fr/#q=intitle%3A%22PayPal+Merchant+Services+-+Payment+Solutions+for+Your+Business+-+PayPal%22 because they will make the phishing website look identical to yours, so you will have more chance to find them using the title tag.

Now, this won't never be 100% efficient.

A good alternative is to use this service, PhishTank, which list all the phishing websites reported by users. But again, if no one reported a malicious website, you won't find it.

Answer 2

I guess you should not count on Google search:

• Google only indexes visible Web: web pages linked from other visible Web pages;

• a robots.txt file or a meta element is enough to for forbid Google from indexing a website or a particular Web page (but I do not believe that phishers actually care);

• main reason: search engines are, by definition, lagging being the current state of the Web. Against phishing Web pages, you need to react very fast. The majority of users do not fall for lame phishing pages: those users are the sensors of a reactive detection system.

Of course you can still try to use Google, but do not expect most phishing pages to show up in Google.