Safari users may be locked out of PayPal

 

Gallery

By Matthew Sparkes

Posted on 18 Apr 2008 at 10:00

A new plan for tackling phishing could see users of some browsers locked out of PayPal, as the company suggests blocking access from "insecure browsers" in order to improve security.

"The alarming fact is that there is a significant set of users who use very old and vulnerable browsers," says a new PayPal report, written by chief information security officer Michael Barrett and senior director of risk management Dan Levy.

"In our view, letting users view the PayPal site on one of these browsers is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seatbelts," it continues.

The report mentions only older versions of Internet Explorer, such as IE3 and IE4, but Apple's Safari has drawn criticism from PayPal in the past for poor security.

"Apple, unfortunately, is lagging behind what it needs to do, to protect its customers," said Barrett last month, explaining that Safari fails to support Extended Validation certificates, a security protocol designed to guarantee that the user is visiting an authentic site.

Reports from the start of this year suggest that Safari has only 2% of the browser market share.