How Good Are You at Recognizing Fake Websites?

Can you tell a fake (phishing) web site from a real one ? Or can you recognize spam emails that request you to verify your eBay or Paypal account credentials.
McAfee has created a very simple quiz with screenshots of websites and emails for you to spot the fake ones from the real site. Do take this 10 question quiz and the results may actually surprise you even when you are a pro-geek - it looks deceptively easy but that's not the reality.
Overall Rating: Tightrope Walker - "You avoided some deceptive Web sites that would have put your personal information at risk. But you chose others PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style Voting that pose serious security threats that could lead to identity theft or financial losses". Share your phishing score in the comments.
PhishTank Detects Phishing Websites by Digg Style VotingOpenDNS, a free service that helps anyone surf the Internet faster with a simple DNS tweak( see below), will announce PhishTank today.PhishTank is a free public database of phishing URLs where anyone can submit their phishes via email or through the website. The submissions are verified by the other community members who then vote for the suspected site.This is such a neat idea as sites can be categorized just based on user feedback without even having to manually verify each and every submission. PhishTank employs the "feedback loop" mechanism where users will be kept updated with the status' of the phish they submit either via email alerts or a personal RSS feed.Naturally, once the PhishTank databases grows, other sites can harness the data using open APIs which will remain free. OpenDNS would also use this data to improve their existing phishing detection algorithms which are already very impressive and efficient.
Download Google Phishing Warning Extension Outside US
Google Safe Browsing is a Firefox plug-in developed by Google that alerts users about phishing websites. Google makes use of a blacklist containing pages that have been identified as suspicious and/or misleading based on automated detection or user reports. Google also examines pages' content and structure in order to catch potentially misleading pages.Google Safe Browsing for Firefox is only available for download for users located in the US. Visitors from other countries are blocked from downloading the Google Safe Browing firefox extension (google-safebrowsing.xpi) and instead, they are redirected to a page saying Download Not Available.Here's a short guide to download and install the Google Phishing Extension for Firefox users outsite the US.1. Open this page in IE and choose Save.2. Start Firefox and drag the google-safebrowsing.xpi onto the Firefox interface.3. Restart Firefox.Download link for US Visitors - Google Safe Browsing for FirefoxGMail, Google's free email service, already has strong anti-phishing capabilities. Email messages suspected of being spoofed messages are labelled Spam and outbound links to fraudlent websites appearing in Phishing email messages are automatically disabled by GMail.When you enable Enhanced Protection Feature, the URL of the site that you're visiting will be sent to Google for evaluation. In addition, a very condensed version of the page's content is sent to compare similarities between authentic and forged pages

simple DNS tweak

When we type a web address in our browser [like http://www.google.com/] and hit go, the request goes to our local ISP servers who translate that domain name into a hard-to-remember IP address [like 66.102.7.104]While this address resolution mechanism is transparent to the average internet user, it can sometimes be the main reason for slow internet access if the DNS servers of your ISP are acting choppy or not working at all.To overcome these problems, you can consider changing your DNS server name to a more reliable but free service called OpenDNS. There's no software to install, just a small tweak in your internet connection settings. We just replaced the default DSN server address of our ISP with the OpenDNS servers which are :
208.67.222.222 208.67.220.220
The DNS server can be changed from the TCP/IP Properties section. [Control Panel -> Network Connections -> Local Network Connection -> TCP IP Properties]Why OpenDNS is good ? Your domain resolution request to OpenDNS is executed from the nearest physical location and the address are also cached at their end. Therefore you notice faster internet browsing. Second OpenDNS would auto-correct misspelled domain names [or typos]. For instance, if you type http://www.gooogle.com/ by mistake, you'll be redirected to http://www.google.com/ without any interventation. The other advantage is that you have a much safer browsing experience since OpenDNS would prevent you from visiting a scam website by error.Some precautions before using OpenDNS1. In the extreme situation when OpenDNS servers go down, you should keep the address of your ISP DNS servers handy.2. You can turn off the phishing protection or auto typo correction by visiting the OpenDNS preferences page.3. Some users might have privacy concerns with OpenDNS while some dislike seeing ads when they mis-spell domain names. The choice is completely your's here.

Category: Tutorial