Is the Web Wallet the answer to phishing?

There I was at MIT in Cambridge yesterday listening to Asst. Prof. Rob Miller talk about phishing, taking notes on my Wi-Fi connected laptop. Literally 9 minutes after Miller concluded, up pops a phishing message on my screen supposedly from Chase bank warning me that “You have received this email because we have strong reason to believe that your chase account had been recently compromised.”

The misspellings further down in the message were among the giveaways on this message. But as Miller said, phishing “seems to be pretty effective” judging by the fact that 5,000 plus phishing sites were found in September, a huge increae from the year before.

During his presentation, Miller discussed research on the Web Wallet, which is designed to keep users from falling for phishing attacks no matter how badly they want to get themselves into trouble online. Among its features is forcing users to compare, then confirm before going to a site instead of just confirming. Read more about Miller’s thoughts on phishing here.

Bob Brown, bbrown@nww.com