14 DAY TRIAL // Recent studies show that phishing, pronounced "fishing" is escalating.
The concept means sending an e-mail to a user falsely claiming to be an established legitimate enterprise in an attempt to scam the user into surrendering private information that will be used for identity theft. And this online threat is just starting to make the users aware of its potential danger. For 2005, experts predict the number of phising scams will be even bigger than what we encountered in 2004.
According to MessageLabs' statistics, the number of phishing attacks really didn't take off until July 2004, when the number of scam-style messages nearly jumped ten-fold from the previous month.
Taking precautions against phising seems like the logical answer, and including such facilities in email clients is an even more efficient action.
Mozilla's very own Thunderbird will include, starting version 1,1, an anti-phising tool. This feature launches a dialog box whenever a link which appears to lead to a phising URL is clicked.
Then the user is asked if he or she really wants to go to that page. The detector is triggered if the URL has a numeric Internet Protocol address rather than a domain name, or if the URL does not match the address displayed in the link text.
Some browsers, Firefox included, already detect some phising scams, so does Mozilla Suite, and they all warn users before visiting a URL that includes an unnecessary username, means by which phishers hide the real domain name of the site.