Interesting, this toolbar provides functionality that has been available as a plugin to firefox for the last year. I suppose this would be a very useful tool if you where running Internet Explorer. Internet Explorer still has allot of vulnerabilities when it comes to this type of attach especially. I would recommend something like this for all IE users. The website also lists many other products that I highly recommend for all users.
I was hit with a phishing attack this morning. I am computer savvy enough that it didn't get anything from me, but it really made me think about the attack and some simple precautions.
In my case, it was two emails both exactly the same. The email said that a certain email address had been added to my PayPal account. Then it offered me a website to click to in order to stop this action if I hadn't initiated it.
The first thing that caught my eye was that the title of the email was not in proper English.
So, I went to the real PayPal site, in another browser tab, and checked to make sure that there were no additional email addresses in my account. Then, I started looking at the PayPal security pages. One of them gave me a real PayPal email address to forward any suspect emails to.
When I went back to the offending email, I started looking a little closer at it. When I rolled the mouse over the addresses, I could see in the status bar that the actual addresses were NOT what the email claimed them to be.
I forwarded both of them to PayPal, and received an email back in minutes confirming that they were phishing attacks.
I had, of course, already deleted them.
Now, a couple of side notes. I use SeaMonkey almost exclusively as my browser. It is written by the Mozilla team, the same folks who created and maintain Firefox, and is only for OSX.
Almost any browser will show the target of any link in either an email or a web page. So, if you suspect ANYTHING about a link, you can easily check make sure that it matches where it is going to direct you, before you link on it.
I was a bit surprised that PayPal included some notes about security in the return email I got from them. They advised a couple of control bars that are available (For Outlook and IE) that help filter out phishing attacks, mostly from known phishing websites. That is good information to have, if you are still using these attack prone programs.
One last note. Make absolutely sure that your email program (If it is a POP or offline program) does NOT load any graphics in an email unless you tell it specifically to do so. Many phishing and spam emails will try to automatically load a graphic, because by doing so, it confirms to the server that yours is a valid email address. If they find out is is valid, you will be inundated with more of them.
There is another kind of attack that is closely related that everyone should be cautious about...
Here is an example in the two same URLs:
https://www.myspace.com/myaccount
https://www.rnyspace.com/myaccount
Did you catch the error?