The Security Mentor

For about ten years everyone's been telling you to check the bottom of your web browser window for a picture of a padlock before you type anything sensitive like a banking password.

That's still a good thing to do but it's getting more complicated. Security firm Netcraft has a new semi-technical paper about trends in phishing which mentions that scammers are now coming up with attacks that do turn on the padlock icon.

Some very bright people are having really intricate arguments about what's wrong and how to fix it. For now, the best a normal person can do is to avoid giving away information if the browser warns you about something wrong with the "certificate", and to keep a close eye on whether you landed at the site you meant to go to (as opposed to one with a similar name, say).