Internet governing body ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers) is finding itself under increasing pressure to come up with a new top level domain that could be used only by banks and other financial institutions to help stop phishing attempts from being successful.

If a .bank or .safe domain name was introduced than it would allow browsers and security software to identify malicious sites with more accuracy and provide better protection to the public.

Due to the massive rise in phishing attacks in recent months the idea has really come to the forefront. UK banking organisation APACS released figures earlier this month showing that online banking fraud has increased from £23.2m in 2005 to £33.5m in 2006, an increase of 44%. This increase was largely blamed on the huge rise of 1,713 in 2005 to 14,156 of phishing incidents.

Speaking on the subject, Mikko Hyppönen, chief research officer at F-Secure said "While a .safe domain name won’t prevent phishing attacks, it will help banks and security providers to keep their customers safe. Using a secure domain name such as .safe will give customers the reassurance they need when banking online.”

Recently there has been the launch of numerous services and enhancements to browser software packages and searching sites designed to warn users that they might be visiting an unsafe web address. Hyppönen thinks these efforts are all well and good but don't make things as safe as they could be. "Right now, customers have no good way of automatically being able to tell whether or not a bank website belongs to the bank," he said.

A .safe domain only available to financial institutions would be comparable to top level domains such .gov, which is only available to government institutions. Evidence so far suggests this approach might lead to a more controlled environment for internet banking. Recent studies based on results from SiteAdvisor, a tool that catalogues and warns users about unsafe sites from McAfee, found that .gov was the only tested domain for which SiteAdvisor said was completely free some unsafe sites.