Safari users victims of phishing
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008PayPal to Safari users: ‘Ditch it’
While current browser share estimates for Apple’s Safari web browser hover somewhere in the 4.5 percent range, Safari is attracting some unwanted attention from PayPal, the eBay-owned payment company. PayPal is urging its users to ditch Safari and instead use alternative browsers such as Internet Explorer 7, IE 8, Firefox 2, Firefox 3, or even Opera.
This I feel is unfair to Safari. The problem here is not that the browser is particularly insecure, but lacks the capability to check URLs against phishing databases, which is not a core function of browsers, in my opinion, but it is an important one. Camino, another Mozilla browser for Mac, also has this problem. Switching to Firefox, or Opera, is the prefered way to handle this problem.
You could also, if you know what you are doing, update the DNS settings in your network config, to use opendns, when you browser reaches out to find the IP of an URL open DNS will sheck ti against its database of phishing sites. This should work in most cases except where the host in link is given as IP. The browser won’t do a DNS lookup in that case. Even if you are using a firefox an other browser that provides phishing protection, I still think you should you openDNS as your primary DNS. There are a host of benefits to doing this, add prhish protection, I mentioned, as well blocking of porn and adult sites(if you like), faster dnslookup which wil increase the over all net web experience.
