* Netcraft Toolbar alerts users to phishing attempts
Phishing – the use of spammed fraudulent e-mail messages to attempt to get people to reveal their personal details usually through a bogus Web site – has reached epidemic proportions. The biggest problem in solving the threat of phishing is that it is not a technology issue: it is an exploit that relies on “social engineering” to work.
So, as with spam, thwarting phishing relies on people being smart enough not to respond rather than being something that can be solved by simply applying technology.
But while technology may not be able to provide a complete fix for phishing, there is no doubt that technology can assist e-mail users by identifying and either flagging or blocking phishing attempts.
This is what a new free product for Microsoft Internet Explorer from Netcraft (see editorial links below) called the Netcraft Toolbar attempts to do.
The Netcraft Toolbar blocks Web sites that are known to act as hosts for phishing attempts as soon as they are discovered and reported to Netcraft. The Toolbar also blocks URLs that are suspicious because they contain characters that are normally only found in attempts to deceive Web site visitors about what server their browser is accessing.
In some phishing attempts, the display of the browser’s navigational toolbar and address bar are suppressed. To defend against browser windows that attempt to hide these controls, Netcraft Toolbar forces their display.
The Toolbar also displays the hosting location of the current site including its country, which can help users evaluate how reliable a URL might be; Netcraft points out that the real citibank.com or barclays.co.uk sites are unlikely to be hosted in the former Soviet Union.
This is a neat and useful toolbar although I have noticed that it occasionally slows down the response of the browser while it interrogates the Netcraft URL database. It is also arguably not useful for truly naïve users as its user interface is not intrusive enough for them to notice things like the Web site being located in a suspicious country (and also assumes that the user will know which countries are suspicious!).
That said, Netcraft Toolbar is really useful for experienced Web users.
