This tip originally appeared on SearchExchange.com.
Phishing, or using bogus URLs in e-mail to lure the unsuspecting into giving up personal information, has become as pervasive and troubling as spam.
Unfortunately, most people aren't aware of how widespread or insidious phishing scams are, and often have a hard time telling if a link is legitimate or not.
To that end, the new Office 2003 Service Pack 2 update adds functions to Microsoft Outlook 2003's Junk E-mail Filter to help protect against phishing scams.
How it works
When Outlook receives an e-mail with hyperlinks in it, the e-mail is checked by the Junk E-mail Filter to see if it might be coming from a spoofed address, or if the links in it are suspicious. If the links look suspicious -- even if the mail itself hasn't been tagged as spam -- the hotlinks in the mail are disabled. Clicking on one of them brings up the warning:
Some links in this message might connect to unsafe or fraudulent sites. To help protect your security, links have been turned off in this message.
A bar at the top of the message reads:
Click here to turn on links. To help protect your security, links are turned off in this message.
Users then has to go through an extra step to open a possibly dangerous link. When doing so, they have the option to add the sender to a list of known good domains.
Because of the way the filter evaluates messages, it's sometimes a little overzealous, but Microsoft decided it was better to err on the side of caution.
For instance, I receive Favorite Search e-mails once a day from eBay -- a report of what's currently matching all my most common eBay searches. The links in the message are "bounced" through the Doubleclick.net ad service. And, since Doubleclick.net isn't listed as a safe domain in my copy of Outlook, the links in my Favorite Search e-mails are blocked.
About the author: Serdar Yegulalp is editor of the Windows Power Users Newsletter.
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Related information from the TechTarget Windows Network:
SearchExchange.com Article: Companies see a surge in phishing attacks
SearchWindowsSecurity.com Tip: Keep attackers from phishing in your waters
SearchExchange.com Reference Center: Exchange Server security tips and resources
