Fishing out the phishers
Apart from all the standard security features, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 does an incredible job in defeating phishers. As evident from the screenshots on the left, when a regular user visits the Paypal website, Firefox marks the address bar in yellow to show that it is an SSL enabled website. When a phisher tries to imitate Paypal’s homepage right down to the last HTML markup tag, the thing that defeats him is the white address bar. A regular user (unlike me; I was almost fooled!) immediately recognizes that this isn’t the original Paypal website. The phisher is stopped dead in his tracks. This isn’t enough to stop phishing scams. But it goes a long way. In case you are even dumber to differentiate between white and yellow, Spoofstick, an anti-phishing Firefox extension might just be your savior.
In other news, Mozilla Firefox 1.0 gets all the adulation it deserves. Also, here’s a step-by-step introduction to Firefox.