PayPal To Require Updated Browsers

I get at least four PayPal phishing spams every day. What about you?

The name PayPal is almost synonymous with phishing scams. According to anti-phishing service PhishTank statistics from last year, PayPal was the number-one target of scams — more than twice as often as PayPal’s parent, eBay, the second most popular target.

On Friday, PayPal announced it was taking an unusual step to combat phishing abuse: blocking old and insecure browsers from its site. It is “an alarming fact that there is a significant set of users who use very old and vulnerable browsers, such as Internet Explorer 4,” the company said.

My question here is this… If I get an email that is phishing for my paypal information, and I click one of their links, what does it matter if PayPal is blocking old browsers? The phishers as I call them will still get my data, and I am pretty sure they have upgraded to the new browsers. So how does this help?

“By displaying the green glow and company name, these newer browsers make it much easier for users to determine whether or not they’re on the site they thought they were visiting,” said PayPal.

If these people are still using browsers as old as Internet Explorer 4, I doubt highly that they would know what they were looking for to make sure they have a legitimate connection to PayPal. I still don’t see how it helps when you are redirected to a phishing site. If you don’t know enough to upgrade your browser, it really isn’t going to make a difference.

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