Welcome!

Cloud Expo Authors: Kevin Benedict, Greg Ness, Ranko Mosic, John Cowan, Gilad Parann-Nissany

Related Topics: Virtualization, Linux

Virtualization: Article

Opera V8 Beta Browser, Like Firefox 1.0.1, Tackles Phishing and Spoofing

Anti-spoof Measures Help Users Make Educated Decisions About a Site's Validity and Security
By Security News Desk
Article Rating:
March 1, 2005 12:00 AM EST
Reads:
 18,463

"One of the most important measures to counter phishing attacks is the use of security certificates," said Christen Krogh, Opera Software's Vice President of Engineering, last week as Opera released the second Beta version of its next browser, which includes an answer to the recent security debate over Web site spoofing.

In this beta, the browser displays security information inside the address bar, located next to the padlock icon that indicates the level of security present on a site.

The small, yellow security bar appears on secure sites and displays the name of the organization that owns the certificate. By clicking on the bar the user has access to more information about the validity of the certificate. These anti-spoof measures help users make educated decisions about a site's validity and security.

"The challenge for browser vendors is to better explain the verification of certificates and to make the user more aware of this additional verification before entering into secure transactions," said Krogh.

To address Internationalized Domain Names (IDN) concerns, Opera's second Beta only displays localized domain names from certain top level domains (TLD). Opera selects TLDs that have established strict policies on the domain names they allow to be registered. This ensures that users who depend on IDN, for example when accessing sites under .jp or .kr, will have a favorable user experience.

Opera will regularly update its list of trusted TLDs, ensuring maximum protection and the best possible user experience.

Opera stands behind its statement made to Beta News on Feb. 18, 2005, asserting that the IDN problem is not one that can be solved alone, but rather together with other browser vendors, domain name registries, certificate authorities and other members of the Internet community. Opera has taken the initiative to assemble a group to evaluate joint solutions.

Beta 2 is available for download at http://www.opera.com/download/.

Users must be aware that a beta should be used for preview purposes only, as it is not a final product and does not contain all the features that are expected with the final release.

Published March 1, 2005 – Reads 18,463
Copyright © 2005 SYS-CON Media, Inc. — All Rights Reserved.
Syndicated stories and blog feeds, all rights reserved by the author.

More Stories By Security News Desk

SYS-CON's Security News desk trawls the world of security for news of software, hardware, products, and services that seems likely to be of interest to infosec professionals and summarizes them for easy assimilation by busy IT managers and staff.

Comments (9) View Comments

Share your thoughts on this story.

Add your comment
You must be signed in to add a comment. Sign-in | Register

In accordance with our Comment Policy, we encourage comments that are on topic, relevant and to-the-point. We will remove comments that include profanity, personal attacks, racial slurs, threats of violence, or other inappropriate material that violates our Terms and Conditions, and will block users who make repeated violations. We ask all readers to expect diversity of opinion and to treat one another with dignity and respect.

Most Recent Comments
suso 03/01/05 06:13:20 AM EST

Has anyone seen alternate character domains? I have been wondering when I would start to see these alternate character set domain names that you can get now play a role in this. You know, like someone registers cnn.com, but the c is not the latin character set c but one from another character set. Or something that almost looks like a c.

Then, without even hacking DNS, you can simply make someone or a group of people think that they are on cnn.com when they are really not. This could be used for things like fake news reports, etc. that make people panic.

Has anyone seen anything like this yet?
TomServo 03/01/05 06:11:15 AM EST

I got a couple of Washington Mutual phishes that a URL like http://www.wamu.com/chooseyourstate.asp?redirect=h ttp://some.ip.address/~username/.wamu/index.html, so the initial link actually did go to the right site. Probably sneaky enough to lure in my parents, unfortunately.

Oh, and no, I haven't verified even the Washington Mutual part of the URL.
More 03/01/05 04:50:00 AM EST

And their CTO Hakon Lie says MS has invalid webpages, and highlights MS's unwillingness to serve the same content to different browsers, IE's poor CSS support, tardy documentation and limitations of their XML format as evidence that MS's commitment to interoperablity is B/S.
cyberformer 03/01/05 04:46:31 AM EST

According to Opera's CEO, some MS sites are deliberately serving broken HTML if the browser identifies itself as Opera. When Opera tells the site it's IE (or Firefox, or anything else), the sites work fine.
Phishing Horrors 03/01/05 04:36:09 AM EST

In December, the Danish security firm Secunia documented a case where a phisher somehow modified a windows host file so that when you type in the correct url in the address, it redirects you to the phisher site.
InfoPoint 03/01/05 04:34:48 AM EST

In other news, Netscape is building Netscape 8 which will include several anti-phishing enhancements and will emphasize security.
MS lagging 03/01/05 04:33:16 AM EST

What the IE response???
Spoofer 02/26/05 08:04:46 AM EST

You can alreday make misleading third level domains under your own domain name, there's no need to spoof anything. It's already possible to set up paypal.mydomain.com without having to resort to obscure character sets.
quezztion 02/26/05 08:02:36 AM EST

Did opera decide nobody in .cn would ever build a paypal lookalike with a domain that looked like "paypal"?
Cloud Expo Breaking News
By Liz McMillan
Wide and cheap availability of cloud-based media services is upon us. With the transformations these services are already bringing to the consumption of music, video and interactive media, change has likewise come to professional workflows. Documents in 2012 are read, written, collaborated on, and distributed anywhere an Internet-enabled device can reach – which is to say, everywhere. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Christopher Kenneally, Director of Business Development a...
Feb. 17, 2012 02:00 PM EST  Reads: 453
By Jeremy Geelan
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) just four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what else h...
Feb. 17, 2012 11:45 AM EST  Reads: 489
By Elizabeth White
Cloud is a shift from the focus on underlying technology implementation to leveraging existing implementations and further building upon them. Cloud orchestration or a network of clouds is the wave of the future where these clouds can operate with elasticity, scalability, and efficiency. Effective service management is an important aspect of managing such networks. The transition to the cloud will enable the further aggregation of composite web services and enhanced business-to-business capabili...
Feb. 17, 2012 10:58 AM EST  Reads: 439
By Brian McCallion
I've been working on Enterprise Cloud Strategy and in the course of this work identified some interesting and non-obvious opportunities in the Cloud. One solution I’ve examined is the well-crafted solution that is enStratus. enStratus has built a SaaS Cloud Management / Governance product focused on providing critical management, monitoring, governance capabilities tailored to the needs of the Global 2000 market, rather than the startup market. As I have worked with a current Fortune 500 clie...
Feb. 17, 2012 07:00 AM EST  Reads: 3,669
By Kevin Jackson
CONGRATULATIONS to National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) CIO Jill T. Singer for being selected as one of the 10 winners of the first annual CloudNOW awards presented in Santa Clara, California earlier this week.

From the NRO Press Release:
"Considered one of the top women leaders in Federal IT, Ms. Singer was recognized for her innova...
Feb. 17, 2012 07:00 AM EST  Reads: 491
By Jeremy Geelan
With Cloud Expo 2012 New York (10th Cloud Expo) now under four months away, what better time to start introducing you in greater detail to the distinguished individuals in our incredible Speaker Faculty for the technical and strategy sessions at the conference... We have technical and strategy sessions for you every day from June 11 through June 14 dealing with every nook and cranny of Cloud Computing and Big Data, but what of those who are presenting? Who are they, where do they work, what e...
Feb. 16, 2012 07:30 AM EST  Reads: 923
By Jeremy Geelan
"Having been in the IT field for many years, I believe the cloud computing chapter in the industry is an exciting one and I am proud to be a part of it," said National Reconaissance Office (NRO) Chief Information Officer Jill T. Singer Tuesday, as it was announced that she was one of 10 winners of the 2012 CloudNOW "Top Ten Women in Cloud" Awards.
Feb. 16, 2012 06:30 AM EST  Reads: 595
By Pat Romanski
2011 was a year of rapid adoption for public and private cloud services. Instant and on-demand server provisioning was the driving force behind the massive growth. On top, cloud server templates and script automation simplified application installation for simple and pre-defined application stacks, but have not targeted more complex enterprise application environments. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, John Yung, CEO of Appcara, will discuss how 2012 will be the year for app...
Feb. 16, 2012 06:30 AM EST  Reads: 2,038
By Liz McMillan
As more enterprises are adopting clouds, the nature of cloud computing is changing. Previously, clouds were used to test applications or for non-mission critical applications. Today, enterprises are using clouds for cost-saving advantages and launching more mission critical applications that have defined performance needs. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, Eric Shepcaro, CEO and Chairman of the Board of Telx, will discuss how distributed computing has many advantages. It wou...
Feb. 16, 2012 05:45 AM EST  Reads: 1,840
By Liz McMillan
Building a cloud computing environment with on-demand access to compute, network, and storage resources requires an elastic infrastructure at multiple levels. Virtualization combined with x86 servers has transformed the way we scale out compute resources. Unfortunately, legacy Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage architectures are rooted in rigid mainframe-era designs, and are fundamentally mismatched with the dynamic, shared modern data center. In his session at the 10th International Cloud Expo, ...
Feb. 16, 2012 05:30 AM EST  Reads: 2,412
MORE »