This is one of a series of papers from The Register, produced by the analysts at Freeform Dynamics.

Here we look at Extended Validation (EV) certificates, which build on the popular Secure Sockets Layer standard to help protect web users against phishing attacks and other kinds of online fraud.

This provides a straightforward primer to answer the following questions:

* What is EV all about?

* How does EV compare to traditional SSL?

* Should businesses be thinking about it?

* And what further can be done?

Finally, a summary collates the action points and provides a distillation of all the best bits.