SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR DETECTING PHISHERS BY ANALYZING WEBSITE REFERRALS

System and method for identifying phishers by analyzing website referrals. A combination of statistical analysis and fingerprinting can be used to assign a relevance score to a referring website that indicates the likelihood that the referring website is a phishing-related website. A fingerprint as used herein with respect to example embodiments is an array of relevant points corresponding to defined HTML tags. The relevance score can be determined at least in part by comparing the fingerprint of a suspect website with that of a base website. The number of matches in relevant points between the two websites determines the relevance score. Provisions can be made for displaying, reporting, and tracking relevance scores so that appropriate actions can be taken as phishing is detected. Additionally, a known-good list of websites can be used to reduce the number of false positives.