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Phishing and Malware Protection

Firefox 3 or later contains built-in Phishing and Malware Protection to help keep you safe online. These features will warn you when a page you visit has been reported as a Web Forgery of a legitimate site (sometimes called phishing pages) or as an Attack Site designed to harm your computer (otherwise known as malware).

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Web Forgery? What is Phishing?
Web Forgery (also known as Phishing) is a form of identity theft that occurs when a malicious Web site impersonates a legitimate one in order to trick you into giving up sensitive information such as passwords, account details, or credit card numbers. Phishing attacks usually come from email messages that attempt to lure the recipient into updating their personal information on fake, but very real looking, Web sites. More information on phishing can be found at the Anti-Phishing Working Group (http://www.antiphishing.org/), and there are a number of examples and resources available at the Wikipedia Phishing page (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phishing).

What is an Attack Site?
What is Malware?
Malware is software designed to harm your computer or steal your personal information without your knowledge. Attack Sites are Web sites that try to infect your computer with malware when you visit. These attacks can be very difficult to detect; even a site that looks safe may be secretly trying to attack you. Attackers will often hack a site to turn it into an Attack Site, and sometimes the Web site’s owner won’t even know that this has happened. You can learn more about Attack Sites and malware from stopbadware.org (http://www.stopbadware.org/home/help), a partnership among academic institutions, technology industry leaders, and volunteers committed to protecting Internet users from threats to their privacy and security caused by bad software.

How does Phishing and Malware Protection work in Firefox?
Phishing and Malware Protection works by checking the sites that you visit against lists of reported phishing and malware sites. These lists are automatically downloaded and updated every 30 minutes or so when the Phishing and Malware Protection features are enabled. The technical details of the safe-browsing protocol are also publicly available.

What information is sent to Mozilla or its partners when Phishing and Malware Protection are enabled?
There are two times when Firefox will communicate with Mozilla’s partners while using Phishing and Malware Protection. The first is during the regular updates to the lists of reporting phishing and malware sites. No information about you or the sites you visit is communicated during list updates. The second is in the event that you encounter a reported phishing or malware site. Before blocking the site, Firefox will request a double-check to ensure that the reported site has not been removed from the list since your last update. In both cases, existing cookies you have from google.com, our list provider, may also be sent.

The Mozilla Privacy Policy (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/en-US/privacy-policy.html) expressly forbids the collection of this data by Mozilla or its partners for any purpose other than improvement of the Phishing and Malware Protection feature. The Google Privacy Policy (http://www.google.com/intl/en/privacypolicy.html) explains how Google handles user cookies.

How do I use the Phishing and Malware Protection features?
These features are turned on by default so unless your security preferences have been changed, you are likely already using them. Phishing and Malware Protection options can be found on the Security Preferences pane. Go to Tools > Options… > Security.

You can test to see if Phishing Protection is active by trying to visit our phishing test site (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/firefox/its-a-trap.html). Likewise, you can try to visit our malware test site (http://en-us.www.mozilla.com/firefox/its-an-attack.html) to confirm that Firefox is blocking Attack Sites as well. With Phishing and Malware Protection turned on, both sites should be blocked from loading.