New Yahoo! services

I was browsing the internet over the weekend and logged on to Yahoo! mail site to check my email. Instead of getting the regular website I was redirected to another Yahoo website (https://protect.login.yahoo.com/login/set_pref/) which prompted me to create my own digital seal for my computer to discourage / prevent phishing attacks.

You have an option to create a text based seal or you can upload your favorite image to create the seal. Another interesting fact is that this seal is computer and browser specific. So if you use multiple computers and multiple browsers like I do, you will have to create it for each one of them.

I think this is an excellent step that Yahoo! has taken in addition to their new look Outlookish mail client beta which I will write about in a later post. At this point Yahoo! does not guarantee that their service is fool-proof and is still in testing phase. All the same it is a very good starting point.

Having said that, I would rather have that the financial services organisations (both banking and non-banking) should do a similar kind of initiative on their websites. This idea has not been validated yet, but it seems to me that this is a very good and cost effective way to thwart phishing and identity theft scams as compared to some of the schemes like two factor authentication using a hardware token.