Is phishtank.org legit or a scam?
PhishTank is a highly reputable anti-phishing clearinghouse operated by Cisco Talos with nearly 20 years of history.
Analysis Summary
No threats detected
All checks passed. This site appears legitimate — but always stay alert for phishing even on trusted domains.
Website Preview
Automated page render — captured in a safe sandbox. What an ordinary visitor would see when loading the site.
MT Intelligence
The domain has been active for over 19 years and is a cornerstone of the cybersecurity industry. Our analysis confirms it is owned and operated by Cisco Talos Intelligence Group, a major global security firm. Every antivirus engine in our network identifies the site as clean, and it is widely cited in academic research and professional security tools. While some website owners have complained about the difficulty of removing old listings, these are typical operational disputes for a blacklist and do not indicate any malicious intent by the site itself. The infrastructure is stable, and the site serves as a public service for reporting internet fraud.
Web Research Findings
Our live research agent queries scam-report databases, consumer-review sites, news coverage, and general web search for phishtank.org, then cross-checks business-registration records and look-alike domain patterns. Everything below is pulled from what it actually found.
- Domain age approximately 7245 days (~19.8 years), registered around late 2006, consistent with PhishTank launch in October 2006.
- PhishTank is a well-known collaborative anti-phishing site and database operated by Cisco Talos Intelligence Group; users submit, verify, and share phishing URLs; provides free API and data feeds used by VirusTotal, security tools, research
- Official sites (phishtank.net, phishtank.com) explicitly state "PhishTank is operated by Cisco Talos Intelligence Group (Talos)" and describe it as a "collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet."
- New user registration has been closed since ~2020 due to abuse; the service is undergoing a redesign with a machine learning backend (as of June 2026 per Wikipedia).
- Multiple Reddit threads discuss difficulties in removing outdated/false positive listings from PhishTank (e.g., cleaned compromised sites still flagged years later), as new accounts cannot be created to dispute them.
- No scam reports, malware associations, or evidence that phishtank.org itself is malicious; it is cited positively in academic papers, Kaggle datasets, security integrations (ServiceNow, StrangeBee, etc.), and as a trusted phishing intellige
- phishtank.org resolves and serves PhishTank content (archive, submissions); frequently used interchangeably with .com/.net in third-party references and blocklists.
- Reddit (r/phishing)open
"Does anyone have experience with getting old/outdated compromises removed from phishtank.org ? The site I manage was compromised three years ago"
- Reddit (r/msp)open
"Experience with PhishTank.org removal? The files the site is reporting are no longer in place, the exploit no longer available. The AV they use apparently uses this phishtank.org as a source"
- Wikipediaopen
"PhishTank was launched in October 2006 by entrepreneur David Ulevitch as an offshoot of OpenDNS. ... OpenDNS was acquired by Cisco and in turn the PhishTank system was turned over to Cisco Talos."
- PhishTank official (phishtank.net)open
"PhishTank is operated by Cisco Talos Intelligence Group (Talos). PhishTank is a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet. Also, PhishTank provides an open API for developers and researchers to int"
- PMC / Research paperopen
"PhishTank, a website employing the concept of crowd-sourcing, aggregates phishing URLs and subsequently verifies their authenticity."
Operated by Cisco Talos Intelligence Group (part of Cisco Systems, Inc., a publicly traded US company). Originally launched 2006 by OpenDNS (acquired by Cisco in 2008).
Antivirus Engines
Security Scans
Checked against the major public blocklists used by browsers and security tools — no hits.
Contact Verification
We fetched the page and looked for real-world contact details. Legitimate businesses almost always publish an email on their own domain, a phone number, and a postal address. Scam shops usually don't.
- No contact email found anywhere on the page.
- No postal address visible on the page.
- Phone number listed (9468015).
Domain & Encryption
Redirect Chain
- 1301http://phishtank.org/
- 2200https://phishtank.org/
Server Reputation
Still, stay alert
No major threat indicators — but a clean scan does not guarantee every page is safe, and phishing emails routinely spoof real domains.
- Double-check the exact URL in your address bar
Confirm you are actually on phishtank.org and not a lookalike like p-hishtank.org.com or an IDN homoglyph.
- Use a password manager
Password managers only auto-fill on the exact domain they were saved for — they refuse to fill lookalike domains, which is the single best phishing defence.
- OpenDiscuss this site on the forum
If you have first-hand experience with this site — good or bad — share it with the MalwareTips community.
Reputation Sources
How this domain rates across independent threat-intelligence and blocklist providers.
Referenced Domains
Outbound domains this page links to or loads resources from. Each links to its own security scan.
Safety FAQ
Common questions about this site, answered directly from the scan data above — so the answers always reflect the latest verdict on this page.
- Our automated security review found no threat indicators on phishtank.org. The site appears legitimate based on the signals we checked, but always stay alert for phishing emails that spoof real domains.
- phishtank.org passed our automated security checks with a trust score of 94/100. No antivirus engines or major blacklists flagged the site at the time of the last scan.
- Yes. phishtank.org presents a valid TLSv1.3 certificate issued by Google Trust Services · WE1, expiring in 64 days. Note that SSL only encrypts the connection — it does not guarantee that the site itself is trustworthy.
- phishtank.org is 19.8 years old, registered on 8/30/2006 through PDR Ltd. d/b/a PublicDomainRegistry.com. Scam domains are often freshly registered — a site under 6 months old warrants extra caution.
- No. All 92 antivirus engines in our malware network report phishtank.org as clean.
- No. phishtank.org is not currently listed on the major browser blocklist feeds that modern browsers use.
- phishtank.org resolves to an IP operated by Cloudflare, Inc. in US (usage type: Content Delivery Network). Hosting location alone doesn't make a site good or bad, but unusual geography for a brand's claimed country is one of many signals we weigh.
- This is a permanent record of the scan run on July 2, 2026. The verdict and evidence above reflect that scan and do not change on their own. If circumstances around phishtank.org have changed, MalwareTips staff can run a fresh scan, which re-runs every check from scratch and publishes an updated report.
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