AS IF “phishing” emails weren’t already hard enough to spot, imagine hackers being able to discover which websites you visit and using this information to personalise their bogus messages. They could then send you a phishing message purporting to be from your own bank, asking you to hand over sensitive information.
This is possible, Markus Jakobsson and colleagues at Indiana University in Bloomington have discovered, because of a flaw in the way websites talk to browsers. They are urging banks and other e-commerce firms to make changes to their sites to make such snooping more difficult.
The vulnerability exploits a…
