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NetCraft's Toolbar community scores 5,600 phishing sites in 5 months!

By Gearhead, NetworkWorld.com, 05/03/05

We know we've written about Netcraft's Toolbar before but we can't remember where ... what reminded us of this free utility for Internet Explorer was a note in the company's monthly newsletter:

Some 5,600 phishing sites have been detected and blocked by people using the Netcraft Toolbar since the system started at the turn of the year.

Impressive.They say that a new version of the toolbar is available and it includes extensions such as site risk ratings, faster browsing, and support for enterprise desktop rollouts.

If you haven't tested this tool here's the overview:

The Toolbar community is effectively a giant neighbourhood watch scheme, empowering the most alert and most expert members to defend everyone within the community against phishing frauds. Once the first recipients of a phishing mail have reported the target URL, it is blocked for community members as they subsequently access the URL. Widely disseminated attacks (people constructing phishing attacks send literally millions of electronic mails in the expectation that some will reach customers of the bank) simply mean that the phishing attack will be reported and blocked sooner.

We just wish they'd produce a version for Firefox and, for that matter, Safari as well. All the same, a terrific tool.

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