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by James Robertson.
Original Post: Another side effect
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One of the outflows of phishing attacks has been advice from banks (and other financial entities) that you should never click a link to a financial site in email - instead, you should enter it by hand. Well, that's a good idea in theory - but this Slashdot piece points out a problem there as well:
"Slate's Paul Boutin reports on the sordid history of the oldest scam on the Internet. For almost as long as the Web has existed, there's been a thriving economy of sites, services, and software vying to grab you as soon as your mistype a URL. Studies estimate that 10-20% of all hand-entered URLs are mistyped, adding up to at least 20 million wrong numbers per day, helping to enrich the likes of porn purveyors, ISP's, Paxfire, Microsoft and VeriSign."
10-20% is a huge number - and I fully expect a lot of those "close but wrong" urls to move from porn to something more dangerous over time. Ultimately, telling people to enter urls by hand is a partial solution at best.
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