Standard Bank is offering free anti-phishing software to its customers to protect against online fraud.

"The new software will protect Standard Bank customers from divulging sensitive financial details to unscrupulous third parties when banking online," the group said in a statement on Monday.

Phishing is the act of sending an email claiming to be an established legitimate organisation in an attempt to elicit private information that will be used to commit fraud.

Standard Bank would provide Rapport anti-phishing software to customers free of charge.

"Phishing globally costs customers and the financial industry billions of rands annually," said Itumeleng Monale, Standard Bank director of self service banking.

The introduction of the software would provide customers with "an effective mechanism that will help prevent them from divulging sensitive and personal financial information to third parties over the internet."

He said that in 2009 there had been 500,000 unique phishing sites identified on the internet with an average of 294 financial institutions targeted globally.

"South Africa has not been immune to phishing threats on the internet with instances of phishing growing exponentially over the past few years."

The Rapport software was in use by international banks to secure over six million customers' browsers from financial malware attacks and fraudulent websites, Monale said.

He said the software strengthened customers' online security by "locking down" the connection between their computer, and Standard Bank's internet banking site.

"The software warns customers if being directed to counterfeit sites, so our customers can be safe in the knowledge that they are transacting on the genuine Standard Bank site and not on a bogus site."

Conventional security software blocks known attacks, but cannot keep up with sophisticated new ones, Monale added.

However, the Rapport online banking security software could detect new threats where conventional applications like anti-virus software often failed to detect a phishing threat, he said.

"The new software also has the ability to inform Standard Bank of potential bogus sites so that the bank's security division can take the necessary proactive steps to stop the attempted fraud."

According to Monale, very often customers had little recourse in claiming funds back from banks if they had compromised their personal financial details over the internet.

"Standard Bank believes that the introduction of the software will greatly reduce customer exposure to online threats like phishing," says Monale.