The software has been installed and used by various companies, security specialists and home users around the world. I have received emails from people thanking us for creating the software.

If you use the full blown outlook then you should considering setting up Phish Phinder on  your own machine today.

Over the last few months I have received various thank you emails from companies and security specialists who are now using and recommending the software.

If you use the full blown outlook then you should considering setting up Phish Phinder on  your own machine today.

Are you safe from Phishing? – www.bluefur.com/phishphinder/

If you have not installed it or not sure what phish phinder is you can read about here.

If you have not installed it or not sure what phish phinder is you can read about here.

When it comes to free software there are a few ways we promote it. Here is what we have done so far.

1. Create a PAD file and upload it to the various software sites.
2. Upload the software to Tucows and Download.com.
3. Order a Press Release (should be out next week).
4. Contact several of the large Phishing groups to ask them to test it.

We did submit it to the 2 largest software download sites but it will take almost a year for Tucows and Download.com to approve it. This surprised me and I was a little disappointed by the length of wait. 

How would you promote this if you were wanting to get more people to download it?

You can view the full details of Phish Phinder, install and whitelist instructions on our Phish Phinder information page.

This plug-in will be free for 6 months after which time we will consider charging those people who are not BlueFur.com customers a small fee for this service.

We hope you find this tool useful and will recommend it to your friends, family and co-workers in order to help combat Phishing.

We feel we are doing our part to fight Phishing, now it is your turn to get involved by spreading the word.

We have received some great input in regards to the Plug-in and we are working on adding these. We have added support to the IMAP service in the plug-in. We are working on a white list feature which we hope will be done shortly before pushing it to the public.

We have also chosen the name “Phish Phinder” for the new plug-in. We feel this is easier to remember and brand. What do you think of the name?

If you want to see what it does here is an example screenshot.

In the above example you will see the real link in brackets so that you can decide if this is a safe link you wish to click on.

As all phishing comes through email I asked why is there not a plug-in for Outlook to find phishing. I searched and could not find a simple solution that would tell me if an email is phishing. Instead of waiting for one to be built we put our development team at Manticore Media to the test to make one.

The challenge was to make a program that works on our clients’ many different machines and yet was still super simple to use. We found that the main problem with phishing emails is that the phishers generally hide their fake links in either an image or through a text link. All the emails come through as HTML so the email would have to be inspected for links.

We came to the conclusion that the easiest way to reveal if an email is phishing is to expose the link so it is visible to the end user. Example:

 Update your paypal (http://www.payp8l.com)

Is this method fool proof?  No but we feel that our tool will help eliminate a lot of the phishing that goes on. This will allow the end user to see exactly where a link is taking them before they click on it.

We are done the Alpha test and now need a few beta testers. The plug-in works for Outlook 2000, 2003 and 2007. If you would like to participate in the beta testing please leave a comment saying your Operating System and Outlook version and we will get you setup.

Please note the plug-in does not work with Outlook Express. Depending on the success of this tool we will consider doing an Outlook Express plug-in later.