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 EarthLink Toolbar Review
April 21, 2005 - Part I
by Andrew Cooper
Preface
Spam is a persistent problem that's been plaguing the Internet since the onset. Phishing, too, although not by its current name, has been known in professional circles for a long time. But neither of them used to have the large-scale circulation or the craftiness they've come to be associated with today.
While plenty of security companies offer solutions that help protect from spam, few products really exist on the market as standalone solutions that can keep phishing from happening in home users' mailboxes. In today's review I want to introduce you to a program that was specially created to protect home users from the perils of phishing.
While spam is just a nuisance and a big waste of time, with people having to manually delete it from their pool of emails, phishing is actually dangerous. It's a fraudulent attempt to deprive people of their financial belongings by luring ignorant recipients to bogus sites where they are inclined to divulge their secret financial data to the perpetrators.
Although it's part of spam, phishing is actually a separate attack on people's financial well-being that utilizes spam's engine to distribute itself. Phishing is hard to identify, especially for people who are just starting to use the Internet.
As loyal readers of pcflank.com should already know, you should never click links contained in messages that appear to have come from financial institutions or other organizations that request personal data to be re-submitted. Instead, you should contact the organization that supposedly sent that message by using publicly available contact details, not the ones given in that solicitation.
The program I would like you to meet today is a small plug-in utility called EarthLink Toolbar (ELT) that has a special capability to protect people connected to the Internet from phishing and other related Internet scams making headlines these days.
Meet the program
EarthLink is a large US Internet service provider (ISP). In the past, it was hit with some phishing incidents where emails, appearing to have come from EarthLink, duped unsuspecting people into divulging their personal data to phishing scammers. So that may be why EarthLink created its give-away proprietary antiphishing solution… or it may have been out of other concerns, but what matters is that the program is free and you don't have to be an EarthLink customer to get it.
A tiny download package of 1.1 Mbs is installed in a snap, and when installation is complete the program builds itself right into one of Internet Explorer's toolbars.
Read next:
Continue to Part II
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