Microsoft's new technology to fight phishing

At next month's RSA Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft plans to announce that a number of websites have gone through a new certification process designed to make it harder for phishers to spoof them. The process gives third-party certification authorities like VeriSign and Entrust a more stringent set of guidelines to follow when they are authenticating websites.

The result of the process is something called an Extended Validation Secure Sockets Layer (EV SSL) certificate, which can be used by sites to help reassure surfers that they are handing over their private information to a legitimate site.

Microsoft is ahead of other browser-makers in supporting EV SSL certificates, which will work with Internet Explorer 7 by the end of this month, but the company needs to persuade other website owners of the technology's worth.

Microsoft plans to show that this is now happening, said Markellos Diorinos, product manager with the Internet Explorer team. "We're getting more and more names that are going to be supporting Extended Validation, and we'll be announcing the first ones at RSA," he said.