We would like to thank everyone that helped Beta Test the Anti-Phishing Watch Outlook Plug-in. It is now confirmed that it works for Outlook 2000, 2003, 2007 on Windows 98/XP and Vista.

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?

We posted last month that we are launching an Anti-Phishing Plug-in for Outlook. We still need beta testers for this to ensure it works with Windows 98 and Vista on Outlook 2000 or 2007. If you have one of these please comment and we will send you the details to installing the plug-in.

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.

With close to 20,000+ Phishing sites discovered in February 2007 we believe that there should be better tools for finding these phishing sites. Most of the newer browsers have a Phishing warning system built into them. The warning system in your browser is a bit of a hit or miss when it comes to protecting you

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.