By now most Internet users know what phishing stands for, or so they think. If you ask them to define phishing most will likely mention that it is about fake email links that lead to look-a-like copies of popular websites. What most users do not know is that their definition of phishing is not entirely [...]

Categories: Browsing, Security

The so called SmartScreen Filter has been added to Internet Explorer 8 by Microsoft. The filter has been designed to warn the user in case unsafe websites are accessed in the web browser. Unsafe websites can for instance be phishing websites or sites that distribute malware. The SmartScreen filter will first check the visited website [...]

Categories: Browsing, Internet Explorer

Phishing is a serious problem on today’s Internet even with phishing protections in email clients, web browsers and security software in place as those security solutions only deal with already reported phishing scams and sites and not new ones. Internet users therefor need to know about phishing and how to identify phishing emails from safe [...]

Categories: Email, Security

Phishing is still one of the biggest threats that users face on the Internet these days. Many security programs and web browsers offer phishing protection but these only catch the known phishing attacks which means that users still have to cope with the unknown attacks until they are identified by the applications. Avira has published [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

Avira has published a top list of brands that experienced the most phishing attacks in 2009. The top 3 brands according to their chart are PayPal with 32205 threats followed by Chase Bank with 25901 threats and eBay with 18738 threats. Each threat in this case refers to a unique Internet address that was being [...]

Categories: Security, The Web

Offering a popular website or web service is not always a blessing. This especially becomes apparent when you have to deal with security related issues like phishing attacks. Facebook is without doubt one of the most popular sites on the Internet these days and it therefor comes unsurprisingly that the service is regularly attacked. Trend [...]

Categories: Facebook, Security, The Web

I have been working for one of the biggest financial organizations in Germany. One of our jobs was to deal with customers who had fallen pray to phishing and other malicious attacks. The attacks in the beginning were not sophisticated at all including emails with errors, no personal information and even some from other organizations [...]

Categories: Security

You might have already read about it in the news elsewhere: The Twitter account of security researcher Mikko H. Hyppönen of F-Secure got suspended without warning two days ago. Mikko tried to contact Twitter support and tried everything in his power to understand why his Twitter account was suspended in first place. He received a [...]

Categories: Online Services, The Web

It is time to update the phishing protection article that we published some time ago (see Phishing explained) with the recent news that thousands of Hotmail users (and apparently Gmail users as well) fell pray to yet another phishing scam. What is phishing? Phishing, which stands for password fishing, is a popular technique to get [...]

Categories: Security