Looks as if Opera has made strides to declare a ‘no phishing zone‘. The commercial browser maker has been working to make sure those that use and let’s be honest; pay for their browser, have a safe browsing experience. Makes sense to me. I am thrilled to see them take such an active roll along side Microsoft and others to combat the phishing problem.

Opera is trying to close the net on phishers with the release last Friday (February 25) of a second beta of its forthcoming Opera 8 browser. The Beta 2 release is designed to display the name of an organisation that owns the certificate of a site inside an address bar, located next to the padlock icon that indicates the security of a site. By clicking on the bar, surfers can find out who issued a certificate.

Carsten Fischer, VP Desktop Products at Opera Software, explained that the approach helps users decide about the validity of a site. “Before digital certificate information wasn’t presented, now at least we’re giving users some information to make a decision. Users need to be a bit more educated,” he said.

An unintended result of the IDN (International Domain Name) standard means domain names can be registered with certain international characters - which look like other commonly-used characters - in order to hoodwink users into believing they are on a different, trusted site. As such, the feature creates a new wheeze for phishing attacks. Microsoft doesn’t support IDN in IE but every other browser manufacturer does, obliging them to act after security firms highlighted the issue last month.