It’s time cryptocurrency investors had a safer browsing experience

Our mission is to help people feel safe when opening a link.

Browser software designed just for cryptocurrency enthusiasts.

Phishing is the number one problem for the Cryptocurrency world today. Over $115M has been lost in phishing scams in 2017 — and most of that has been in recent months as new Token launches and ICOs come online every day. And this is only going to get worse as the number of new ICOs and Tokens increase, while more cybercriminals realize the financial gains of migrating their efforts from email to messaging services.

Our mission at MetaCert is to help people feel safe and secure when opening a link. As Kamrul puts the finishing touches to our security app for Slack before submitting it for review, I write the technical requirements for the new browser add-ons that we’re about to build.

Shooting phish in a barrel

MetaCert is building anti-phishing add-ons that will catch more phishing attacks than any mainstream browser that uses the Google Safe Browser API. My assertion can easily be verified by testing our API, or any of the apps on metacert.com.

These add-ons will be super simple and will only do one thing — protect you from phishing scams.

I’ve always been in favor of “Single-purpose” add-ons. In fact, Google now requires developers to keep their add-ons to a single-purpose.

To maintain the quality of the Chrome user experience, we require Chrome extensions to have a single purpose. For an overview of the policy announcement, please read this Chromium blog post.

We launched this policy because multi-purpose extensions can crowd your browser UI and slow down your web browsing sometimes significantly. Speed and simplicity have always been part of Chrome’s core principles, so this policy will help us get back to the design that was originally intended. Also, unexpected changes to browser functionality and settings have become the number one user complaint for Chrome users, and this policy helps minimize the problem by ensuring that users understand what extensions are doing.

Block the bad stuff!

How it works is simple. When you try to visit a website or twitter account (or a tweet that belongs to a twitter account — there’s a massive technical difference) that’s labeled as ‘Phishing’, the browser will redirect you to a warning page.

Show me when it’s safe

It will be worth installing the add-on for this benefit alone.

We will certify and whitelist all of our crypto customers’ websites and twitter accounts. So when you visit a certified site, the entire URL address bar will turn green. This will indicate that the site is 100% safe. Customers will not need to pay for this service. It will be completely free.

With this add-on, you can now safely assume that if the address bar is not green, the site is NOT safe.

This add-on will save people $$$

Phishing scammers now use SSL Certificates so browsers place a padlock in the toolbar. A SSL Cert only indicates that a site is “secure”. But unfortunately many users mistaken this for “we have verified who owns this domain name”.

We will open source our code

Open source does take a little time and effort to maintain, so we will open source our code, but perhaps not on day one. We will open source it as soon as we possible can. We simply don’t have enough people to build everything we would like to build.

A little insight to the developers

Our COO at MetaCert is Ian Hayward. As one of the first 25 contributors to Mozilla, Ian built, funded and maintained SpreadFireFox — a developer portal for the Firefox community. As a side note, I hosted the biggest Firefox birthday party in the world on behalf of Mozilla when I rented out an iMax cinema. I think it was bday #2. Fun but hardly as important as Ian’s work.

Ian, along with three of our engineers, built the mainstream add-ons for digg, Delicious, Yahoo!, eBay, PayPal and Google. And they contributed to bug fixing Firefox. So, you can trust what we build. We won’t do anything dodgy like embed mining software.

We should have a first beta by October 5th. Please help us spread the word about this project as we believe users need all the protection that they can get.

We have also build a News Reputation add-on called “Check This” for Chrome and Firefox. And a parental control browser add-on that’s used by schools and families to protect kids from pornography.

And last, but not least, I first started in search annotation when Ian and I worked together to build a browser add-on in 2007. We built an add-on that was formally endorsed by the W3C as one of the most compelling implementations of the Semantic Web.

In 2005 I co-instigated the creation of the W3C Standard for Content Labeling / URL Classification, which formally replaced PICS as a Full Recommendation in 2009.So it stands to reason that we should build an add-on to protect the Crypto world from phishing attacks. 🎣🚨✌️

We will work with our Crypto customers to help promote these add-ons to Slack community members so they can add an extra layer of security to their browser experience. If you would like to be a beta tester please email us beta @metacert.com

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