SECURE WEB SITE AUTHENTICATION USING WEB SITE CHARACTERISTICS, SECURE USER CREDENTIALS AND PRIVATE BROWSER

A secure authentication process detects and prevents phishing and pharming attacks for specific web sites. The process is based on a dedicated secure hardware store for user sign-in credentials, a database of information about specific web sites, and a private secure browser. All user web activity is monitored by an agent program. The agent program checks to make sure that user attempts to send any sign-in credentials stored in secure hardware store of user sign-in credentials, to any web site accessed by the user, is allowed only if the IP address of the web site accessed by the user matches at least one of the IP addresses stored web site database associated with the sign-in credential the user is attempting to send. The process also detects mismatches between a URL and the actual IP address of the web site associated with the URL.