Phishing is a type of fraud where scammers trick people into giving personal information. Anti-phishing tools like filters and toolbars help prevent attacks by identifying suspicious emails, links, and websites. These tools can warn users of suspicious sites, analyze URLs, and check registrants. They may also provide risk ratings, country hosting information, and SSL encryption alerts.
Phishing is a type of fraud conducted primarily through email, Short Message Service (SMS) messages, and websites, in which the target is tricked into divulging personal information, such as Social Security numbers, credit card numbers, names username and password, which the scammer intends to use for identity theft and/or gain. Attempts to thwart phishing attacks are undertaken in various ways, including identifying spam emails, disabling links that look suspicious, blocking attachments in emails, and known phishing sites on the Internet and the provision of notices and host information on websites that may not be what they appear to be, allowing users to exercise discretion. Anti-phishing is an adjective used to describe various implementations intended to intercept and prevent phishing attacks. It can be used, for example, in compounds such as Phishing Filter and Phishing Toolbar, two devices to help prevent phishing scams.
Although most phishing scams attack with an email, they often try to lure the target to a spoof website – one that looks like a legitimate website, but isn’t, set up to harvest the target’s information . An anti-phishing toolbar works in conjunction with a web browser to block or warn users of suspicious sites. These are browser-specific plug-ins and appear at the top of the browser view, integrated with browser toolbar elements.
There are several ways an anti-phishing toolbar can work. It may depend on a continuously updated list of known phishing sites. It can analyze the URL for similarity to legitimate sites, a trick often used by scammers, who register domains using parts of trade names and possible typos. Also, it can check the registrant of the site.
An anti-phishing toolbar can work in one or more ways. It can provide a pop-up warning dialog when the user tries to access a suspicious site. Some anti-phishing toolbars take steps to enlarge the site’s domain name, making the fakes and tampers more obvious to the user. Other features that an anti-phishing toolbar can have include risk ratings of the website, publishing the name of the country where the site is hosted, and alerting the user of a site that does not use SSL encryption ( Secure Sockets Layer) for sending the password.
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