Volunteers do the work here
There is no paid analyst floor behind this data. Review, curation, code, and docs come from people who do this alongside their day jobs. Below is what we actually need — pick the one that matches what you already know.
Our DNSBL and feeds are queried millions of times a day. Work you land this month is rejecting mail next month.
Everything is AGPL-3.0. Your contributions are public, citable, and yours to show — useful on a CV in a way internal work isn't.
We're researchers, sysadmins, and security engineers sharing data freely. No vendor lock-in, no paywall on the threat intelligence itself.
Roles we're looking for
no minimum hours — one good review a week helpsEmail Security Engineers
Help build and refine our DNSBL, SPF/DKIM/DMARC analysis, and mail flow integrations. Experience with Postfix, Exim, rspamd, or SpamAssassin is a plus.
DNS & Network Engineers
Improve our DNSBL infrastructure, zone file generation, and DNS query performance. Familiarity with PowerDNS, BIND, or RPZ zones welcome.
Cybersecurity Professionals
Analyze phishing campaigns, validate IOCs, reverse-engineer phishing kits, and improve detection heuristics. Threat intel and incident response experience valued.
Government & Public Sector
Advise on compliance, data-sharing frameworks, and coordination with CERTs and law enforcement. Help bridge the gap between community intelligence and institutional response.
Academic Researchers & Professors
Collaborate on phishing research, publish studies using our dataset, mentor student contributors, and help validate our methodology. CS, cybersecurity, and cryptography backgrounds welcome.
ML & Data Science Engineers
Build classifiers for phishing detection, analyze threat patterns at scale, and develop models for IOC scoring and anomaly detection.
Computer Scientists
Contribute to core algorithms — hashing, indexing, search optimization, and distributed system design for high-throughput IOC processing.
Network & Infrastructure Engineers
Cisco, HPE, Juniper, or cloud networking experience. Help with firewall integration guides, BGP-based blocklists, and enterprise deployment patterns.
Software Engineers
Contribute to our Go API, Next.js frontend, or agent daemon. We're open-source (AGPL-3.0) and welcome PRs for features, bug fixes, and integrations.
QA & Security Testers
Pen-test our platform, fuzz our APIs, and help harden the system. Responsible disclosure and security-first mindset required.
Threat Intelligence Analysts
Curate feeds, verify community submissions, track phishing campaigns, and produce actionable intelligence reports for the community.
Technical Writers & Educators
Write integration guides, onboarding docs, blog posts, and educational content. Help make anti-phishing tools accessible to everyone.
Community Moderators
Help review submissions, mentor new reporters, moderate discussions, and maintain the quality of our community-driven threat database.
DevOps & SRE Engineers
Improve our CI/CD, containerization, monitoring, and deployment. Experience with Docker, Kubernetes, or cloud platforms (AWS/GCP) is helpful.
Volunteer application
A maintainer reads every application — no ATS, no take-home.
You don't need permission to be useful. Submit what your mail filter catches, vote in the review queue, or open a PR. Trust tier follows from accurate work, not from an interview.
Found something in the platform itself? Report it privately first — we publish the fix and credit you once it's shipped.
security@vspam.org