Thunderbird promises to fend off phishers

Found on CNet on Sunday, 23 January 2005
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Mozilla contributor Henrik Gemal wrote last week in a blog that a phishing detector has been added to Thunderbird. This feature is likely to be available in the next release of Thunderbird, version 1.1, according to the Mozilla bug report.

With the new Thunderbird feature, when a user clicks on a link in an e-mail that appears to be a phishing URL, the detector will prompt the user with a dialog box before the Web site is opened, Gemal wrote. The detector is triggered if the URL has a numeric Internet Protocol address rather than a domain name, or if the URL does not match the address displayed in the link text.

Firefox, the Mozilla Organization's browser software, and Mozilla Suite, its Internet application package, can already detect some phishing scams, according to a posting on the Mozilla news site, MozillaZine. These applications will warn people who try to visit a URL that includes an unnecessary username--a trick used by phishers to hide the true domain name of a site.

Nice to see that Mozilla pays attention to security. With the growing success of Thunderbird, hopefully less people will fall for scams.