Phishing Protection

IE7 and Firefox 2.0 have good mechanisms built into them to protect the unwary/casual user from phishing attacks.

Whenever I receive emails from financial establishments, I am extra cautious on what I do with them. I would rather type-in the url than click on some link in my inbox unless it has some state information on the url. In those circumstances, I double check to verify where the link actually takes me.

One of these days I received an email in my yahoo inbox supposedly from Chase. I recognized it right away as a phishing email.

I would generally delete the mail. But with the advertised phishing protection mechanisms of both the browsers, I thought may be I should test to see how these fare.

.. and both of them already had the link in their phishing databases. Responses are below.

FireFox


IE


I submitted the link to Phishtank some days later, but the site had already vanished and was unverifiable.

So guys, always beware. Help yourself by being cautious.

To learn more about the actual implementation, click here for IE and here for Firefox