Australia waits for MSN anti-phishing protection

The announcement, made on Tuesday, came a week after Microsoft had made public its plans to launch the software soon and denied that this was a change of plan. Many had assumed the filter would only appear in Internet Explorer 7, which does not yet have a launch date.

However, the Microsoft Phishing Filter beta has only been made available to Internet users based in the US.

A nineMSN spokesperson on Thursday said the toolbar will be distributed outside the US but would not specify when because the product is still in beta testing stage.

"We are continually working to expand our offerings across additional markets, but have nothing more specific to share at this time," the spokesperson said.

Microsoft began to focus on phishing as an important threat to Internet security earlier this year. Phishers create fraudulent Web sites that resemble those of legitimate businesses in an attempt to collect personal information and banking details from unsuspecting users.

According to Microsoft the new filter will "proactively help protect the customer" when the customer enters a phishing site. The add-in uses "a dynamic system that quickly checks the Web pages customers visit" through an online service that is updated regularly. The filter will also block customers from entering personal data if the site is confirmed as suspicious, the company says.

The new filter uses three main techniques for identifying phishing sites; It compares addresses of Web sites a consumer attempts to visit with a list of reported legitimate sites that is stored on the consumer's computer and updated periodically, it analyses the sites that people seek to visit for characteristics common to phishing sites, and it provides an option to automatically send Web site addresses that a consumer attempts to visit to an online service run by Microsoft that checks the address against a frequently updated list of reported phishing sites.

The nineMSN spokesperson explained that the technologies used by IE7 and MSN's toolbar are based on the same technology.

"Microsoft Phishing Filter beta technology... in both the IE 7 beta and the MSN Search Toolbar is same, however the consumer experience differs slightly... The MSN Search Toolbar automatically blocks the consumer from entering personal information on the site. For consumers using the IE 7 beta... the consumer is automatically navigated away from that site to a new page. In both scenarios, consumers have the option to proceed at their own risk to the URL".

The beta version of Microsoft Phishing Filter for MSN is available from http://addins.msn.com if you're based in the US.