COUNTERING PHISHING ATTACKS

Countering phishing attacks by generating multiple synthetic victims, where each of the synthetic victims includes synthetic victim information that represents a computer user identity and includes associated sensitive information, where the computer user identity and its associated sensitive information are fictitious in that they are not known to be associated with a legitimate computer user, providing any of the synthetic victim information of the synthetic victims to a computer-hosted phishing site, storing the synthetic victim information in a computer-accessible database, receiving from a computer-hosted target site information provided to the computer-hosted target site by a requestor, identifying in the computer-accessible database database synthetic victim information matching the requestor information, and notifying the computer-hosted target site that the requestor information is of a synthetic victim.