Crypto-crime research group Security Alliance unveils new way to report potential phishing sites

On October 14th, the "Security Alliance" (SEAL), a crypto crime investigation unit, announced a new way to report potential phishing websites that use increasingly sophisticated methods to hide the tracks of hackers.
SEAL says that traditional automated scanning of URLs suffers from common problems with web crawlers, such as captchas, anti-bot protection, and that fraudsters have a "disguise" function that provides harmless content to suspected scanners, so they need a way to see what users see. Its new "verifiable phishing whistleblower" uses a new encryption scheme called "TLS Proof", which allows white hat hackers to check websites as seen by potential victims. SEAL points out that transport-layer security itself does not support the generation of session records, leaving an opportunity for third parties to misrepresent content. Users can submit a proof through this program, and SEAL verifies and ensures that the content is properly signed and contains evidence of malicious activity. The feature has been privately tested for about a month and is now available to the public.