TrustWatch & MSN Offer Anti-Phishing Tools To Searchers & Surfers

TrustWatch is a new Ask Jeeves-powered search engine designed to give you a
green, yellow or red light warning on whether to trust pages listed in its
results. It follows on the release of an anti-phishing add-on for users of the
MSN Search toolbar.

At TrustWatch, the warnings are to help you know if you are reaching a fake
site or one that’s “phishing”
for you to reveal personal information.

For example, imagine you were trying to reach the Bank Of America site. It’s
possible that someone might create a site that looks like the real BofA site and
ranks well for a search on the company’s name. A good search engine shouldn’t
let this happen, but it still can occur. Even more likely, it can happen if you
search using a slight misspelling.

TrustWatch places colored rating icons next to each listing. Green means the
listing has been verified as real and trustworthy by a third party. Yellow means
there’s been no verification, but neither has the site been reported on a
blacklist. Red means someone has reported a site as disreputable and that you
shouldn’t trust it.

Run a web site and want to be trusted? GeoTrust, the company behind
TrustWatch, will conveniently sell you a site identity seal for $49 per year.
You can also get a trust rating from one of the other companies that it lists,
including TRUSTe. I wish the
page TrustWatch lists
with these organizations made it exceptionally clear exactly which products each
of these companies are selling are acceptable, especially what the lowest cost
options are.

I can understand that site owners probably should pay to be rated. Someone’s
got to do the reviewing. But it shouldn’t be super expensive. Plus, non-profits
and governmental groups should get a break. Of course, I see the US White House
site is considered
trusted, and I’m betting they didn’t pay for a review.

Want to know if something is trustworthy as you surf the web? There’s a
TrustWatch toolbar you can install
that lights up to let you know if a site is trusted when you visit it.

That brings me over to news from earlier this month. Microsoft has a
Phishing Filter Add-In for
its MSN Search Toolbar. Like TrustWatch’s, it’s only for Internet Explorer,
unfortunately. It will block sites that are on known phishing lists and warn you
of sites that it suspect may be phishing based on scanning for common
characteristics.

Having these features in toolbars is great, of course. In fact, I’m guessing
we’ll see Ask Jeeves down the line add TrustWatch-powered warnings to its
toolbar since it’s partnering to provide TrustWatch with search results. But it
would be nice to see anti-phishing warnings in the results of the major search
engines, as well.

I mean, the Ask Jeeves blog today is what
alerted me and
others to the new TrustWatch service. Rather than have Ask Jeeves point me
elsewhere, I obviously want them to put these features into their own search
results. Same, too, with MSN. Give phishing warnings in the search results, as
well as in the toolbar. And let’s see Google and Yahoo do the same.

Want to discuss? Visit our forum thread,

Ask.com Powers TrustWatch – GeoTrust’s Secure Engine.