Anti-Phishing Toolbar: A Tool To Combat Phishing Attacks

Benefits Of Anti- Phishing Toolbars

An Anti-Phishing Toolbar reports fraudulent websites and deceptive activities. It is browser dependent, and as such, separate toolbars are developed by their service providers for Firefox, IE and Chrome separately. Another benefit is that they are mostly free and provide one or more of the following benefits:

• Helps to prevent malicious attack called “web spoofing” or “phishing.”
• Protection against phishing sites and can check for email content, body of the document in an email , webpage fields such as username and password, suspicious links, images etc.
• Reporting and blocking of suspected phishing & fraudulent websites
• Displays risk ratings against malicious websites.
• Protects against cross-site scripting (XSS) by validating webpage content.
• Filters out the deceptive e-mails from the inbox that appear to be coming from a famous commercial site such as Amazon.
• Provides detailed site reports including content, risk rating etc.

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Some Drawbacks of Anti-Phishing Toolbars Are:

Most of the times an anti-phishing toolbar detects a phishing email and web sites based on the keywords, texts that seem to be attempting to convince a user to input login credentials, bank account details, personal information etc. Hence there is high likelihood that the anti-phishing toolbar might allow some specially crafted phishing emails. There are some drawbacks of using the anti-phishing toolbar, such as:

• An anti-phishing toolbar covers only a small area of the main window and remains unnoticed by users for the most part.
• Security ultimately depends on human beings who can make errors as most of the anti-phishing toolbar can still miss most of the fraudulent sites.
• Many anti-phishing toolbars sometimes may incorrectly identify a significant fraction of legitimate sites as malicious preventing the access to the user.
• The toolbar shows security-related warnings, but users often ignore them since a few sites they know are safe are flagged by security toolbars.
• Many of the anti-phishing toolbars are vulnerable to exploits such as CDN attacks(Content Distribution Network attack)

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