Tabnapping, The Son of Phishing Attacks

Traditional Phishing Attacks

Conventional phishing attacks are usually done by email.

Upon receiving an email claiming to be from Facebook (for example), you click the link inside. Unbeknown to you, the link shown on the url bar is not facebook.com. And you enter you login information. You account will then be compromised by the fake site.

Most people will no longer fall for this phishing attack since a lot of awareness has been created about this.

Latest Phishing Attacks

However, the latest in internet security news has it that there is a new form of phishing termed as ‘tabnapping’.

Let’s use Paypal for the below example.

What happens with tabnapping is that you visit a seemingly innocent website. When you move on to visit another site on a new tab, that website will change into a fake Paypal site. Most of us who surf the web with multiple tabs will not realise this and when we switch the tabs back, we would believe that we have forgotten to login to Paypal and login. This is how your account information will be compromised and in this case your Paypal funds will be gone.

You can see an example of tabnapping on the site belonging to Aza Raskin (the creative lead of Mozilla Firefox). See what happens a few seconds. On that very same site, Raskin hasĀ  explained how tabnapping works and provided some tips to prevent yourself from being a victim.

I’ve especially highlighted tabnapping here at Logish Empire so that you will safeguard all your information sensitive accounts. This includes your domain name registrar accounts.

Logen L.

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