PhishTank was launched in October 2006 by entrepreneur David Ulevitch as an offshoot of OpenDNS.

Mail, Mcafee, APWG, CMU, ST Benard, Mozilla, Kaspersky, Firetrust, Officer Blue, FINRA, Message Level, SURBL, Sanesecurity for ClamAV,[5] Career Builder, Site Truth, Avira,[6] C-SIRT,[citation needed] and by PhishTank SiteChecker.

[7][8] PhishTank data is provided free for download or for access via an API call, including for commercial use, under a restrictive license.

In 2020, because of flagrant abuse of the PhishTank system, "new user" registration was removed, and will remain off for the foreseeable future.

PhishTank is currently being rethought from the ground up to provide better support, remove abuse, and operate faster with a machine learning backend phish identification system.