Spoof Check bookmarklet
Several new scams are making their way around the internet (most recently a PayPal scam) that direct users to “spoofed” websites. These websites take advantage of a known flaw in Internet Explorer to display a fake URL in the address & status bar.
One of the suggestions from Microsoft to verify “suspicious” websites is to type in a Javascript string to verify that the page is hosted that URL displayed in the address bar. Given the length of the code needed to verify the address, this is a well-intended suggestion, but it’s just not practical.
Kevin Donahue has created a quick and easy bookmarklet to help prevent spoofed URLs in Internet Explorer using the Microsoft suggested code. If you’re an IE user this bookmarklet is a great way to verify the page you’re viewing isn’t spoofed, especially if you arrived there from an email message.
Visit Kevin’s website for the Spoof Check Bookmarklet.
December 28th, 2003 at 10:07 pm
Microsoft sure is acting like they don’t care about IE anymore, aren’t they? They’ve dropped support for IE on Macs, and now they do this half-assed “bug fix” for a serious problem. I guess that they don’t care about the browser market anymore, and I can’t say I blame them, they’ve crushed all the other commercial browsers, the new generation of great browsers (Firebird, Camino) are all open source.
December 29th, 2003 at 7:22 am
The next version of IE is meant to come out with either with the next version of windows (longhorn hopefully in 2005) or with the next windows xp service pack. I think it is the first of those two but even if Microsoft stop their support for these products, as it is so semlessly built into Windows the majority of people use it !
December 29th, 2003 at 11:00 am
Thanks for this one… I got spoofed some days ago aswell …
my paypal scam post
br,christoph
December 29th, 2003 at 11:38 am
Help Prevent Spoofed URLs in Internet Explorer [via scriptygoddess]
December 30th, 2003 at 3:38 am
Kevin Donahue has an excellent post and a little trick to make sure you aren’t scammed by a fake URL. The following is from one of his posts. Help Prevent Spoofed URLs in Internet Explorer - After reading about the new Paypal scam involving spoofed web…