Anilrgowda

Opera 9.1 released, adds real-time phishing protection
By Jeremy Reimer
December 18, 2006
Opera has just released the latest upgrade to their critically-acclaimed web browser, version 9.1. While a .1 upgrade is not normally an event worthy of a news post, the new version adds an interesting and important feature: real-time phishing protection for web sites. Phishing is rapidly becoming the malware of choice for the Internet's motley gang of spamming scammers. As it relies on social engineering rather than any technical vulnerability to do its dirty work , no amount of downloading security updates or switching operating systems can protect against it.
Both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 shipped with antiphishing tools included, and Opera 9.1 joins in the antiphishing battle with a real-time filter that checks each visited site against a blacklist of suspected fradulent web sites. The site check is hosted by Opera and makes use of GeoTrust's TrustWatch service in addition to checking the database from the community site PhishTank.
The automatic site checking tool makes loading new sites slightly slower, as it runs the site through the database, and for this reason it is turned off by default. However, even with the feature turned off, a black question mark icon appears on the right hand side of the address bar for every site. When clicked, this question mark allows the user to check the site manually, as well as turn on automatic checking for all future sites. When a site is verified as being safe, the black question mark turns into a black lower-case "i" to indicate that the site has been identified.
Even if the user turns off the automatic fraud protection, sites that have been previously verified as being safe will still display as such. Sites flagged as unsafe get a red warning label and a popup dialog box to inform the user.The fraud protection has also been redesigned to prevent reverse cross-site request scams, such as the ones that recently affected MySpace and caused problems for both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7.