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 EarthLink Toolbar Review
April 21, 2005 - Part II
by Andrew Cooper
ELT only works with Internet Explorer and is not compatible with other browsers. Its most powerful feature is the ScamBlocker, which helps to identify whether the Internet page a surfer lands himself in presents a phishing threat. To do that, it employs various techniques from the leading antispam and antiphishing think tank Brightmail (recently acquired by Symantec Corp). One of those techniques is holding up the page's IP address against a list of known offensive Internet sites. If the program determines that the user is attempting to go to one of those fraudulent websites, it bars that transition and displays a warning window with all the relevant information. From that window, a user may decide whether to go back to the original page or follow the program's recommendation on how to treat the possible scam. Two things are important here: ScamBlocker must remain "ON" at all times (you can toggle ScamBlocker on and off by clicking its icon with your mouse) and second, that you access suspicious websites only with IE- it's the only browser ELT works with. Below is a snapshot of my attempt to follow the link given in a "phished" email disguised as a message from Washington Mutual Internet Banking, which is shown first:
The program stopped me from falling victim to phishers and hopefully will thwart other phishers' attempts in the future.
What else is interesting about this program?
A pop-up windows blocker; news aggregator that retrieves top news from multiple sources and categorizes them according to topics; a Google search, available right from the program's search field; an option to fetch various stock quotes; peoples' addresses, listed from the white and yellow pages directory; and some other little perks.
Summary
In this short article we've looked at a program poised to make life a lot easier for people who risk falling prey to phishers' attacks. Though we should be warned to steer away from responding to phishers' correspondence, this program is nevertheless very useful and leads to a safer internet experience.
Developer's web site: www.earthlink.net/
Download link: www.earthlink.net/software/free/toolbar
Read next:
Back to Part I
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