I've been a fan of RoboForm for some time now. It saves my many passwords, and retrieves them when needed. What I didn't realize is that it also helps protect against phishing and pharming, according to Bob Williamson in a letter to PC Magazine published in the June 7th issue. (I'd like to give you a link to the original letter, but I can't find it, or much of anything else, on the PC Magazine site. Why, or why, do the technology publications have such bad search engines. Sorry, I digress.)
According to Williamson, RoboForm will not offer to enter the saved name and password for a site if the underlying URL does not match with the one it has stored. So if you link through from a fake URL in an email, Roboform "would simply not fill in the fake form."
Pharming, a technique which redirects traffic from a legitimate web site to a fake one, can also be stymied by Roboform as "the falsified Web site would have to have the exact underlying URL/code for RoboForm to function."
There's no guarantee of safety, of course, if you choose to enter the user name and password yourself.
That settles it. If I can't get to it via RoboForm, I just don't even want to go there!
