Opera 9.1 Features Fraud Protection

Opera Software has released Opera 9.1, which includes a new phishing filter called Fraud Protection.

The company said that Fraud Protection incorporates technology from GeoTrust, a leading digital certificate provider, and PhishTank, a collaborative clearing house for data and information about phishing on the Internet.

Fraud Portection displays small warnings whenever users visit suspect sites that it thinks may attempt to steal a password or other confidential information. It delivers both speed and responsiveness by providing the user with real-time anti-phishing detection, augmented with nearly immediate identification of suspected phishing sites.

A browser warning is sent to Opera users who visit sites listed as suspect on the OpenDNS' PhishTank project list, which can be found at PhishTank.com. Web surfers who think that they have found a phishing site or message can submit information to PhishTank.com for examination by other users. And messages or sites determined by users to be potentially dangerous are then labeled as such.

In a statement, Jon von Tetzchner, Chief Executive Officer of Opera Software, said that cyber-criminals are very active during the holiday season as more people venture online to shop or connect with friends and family. At Opera, they work very hard to protect the users of their products. They commit a lot of resources to ensure that their users are as safe as possible when they are online. Opera's Fraud Protection tool is something they have created with their partners to help users protect themselves.

Talking about the partnership with Opera, David Ulevitch, Founder, PhishTank, said that they are thrilled that Opera chose PhishTank among all of the available sources of phishing data. Opera has long been a leader in innovation and usability, and they hope Opera users find the addition of Fraud Protection from PhishTank of value.

Fraud Protection extends the original anti-phishing capability in Opera. Opera 8 introduced the security information field to help determine if a phishing site was masquerading as a trusted and verified site. Fraud Protection adds a new level of online safety by working in real-time to protect Opera users from the latest phishing attacks.

Fraud Protection has also been re-designed to prevent reverse cross-site request scams, such as the ones that recently affected MySpace and caused problems for both Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7.

Meanwhile, Opera 9.1 browser, which is available free, also contains some non-phishing updates, such as fixes to the Windows Media plugin player, as well as several memory leak and crash fixes.

Regards,
Nikhil Kale.