A toolbar designed to help Web surfers elude phishing scams has been released for Microsoft Internet Explorer by Netcraft, a British Internet monitoring company.
The free toolbar gives users continuously updated information about Websites they visit and blocks “dangerous” sites, Netcraft said in a tutorial on their own Website, “which will help you make an informed choice about the integrity of those sites.”
Netcraft also said they are working on a version of the toolbar for those using Mozilla’s new and increasingly popular Firefox browser.
The toolbar uses the Netcraft Website information database to show users attributes of sites they visit including country of origin, site longevity, and site popularity, and combines those features with a site blocker of known phishing URLs that Netcraft users help the company update when they find new phishing sources and report them to the company.
It isn’t entirely without problems, however. “Filtering of some suspicious characters was too aggressive and actually blocked some URLs on benign sites including Google and Amazon,” Netcraft said in a December 29 security posting. “We have made an update to the toolbar which will propagate during the course of today. “
According to Netcraft reporting information Brunei is believed to be the likeliest host source for phishing Websites, with a 1-in-292 probability factor. Belarus (1-in-903) was a distant second in the probability factor, followed by the Palestinian territories (1-in-935), Nicaragua (1-in-970), and a distant-fifth Taiwan (1-in-1,257).
“[P]rofessional fraudsters will take steps to ensure that the process [of isolating and closing phishing sites] is as difficult and time consuming as possible: your time is their money,” Netcraft said. “Fraudsters will often host their sites in developing countries with limited law enforcement resources and incentivize the hosting company to keep the site running as long as it possibly can. Indeed, some unscrupulous hosting companies actually promote fraud hosting as a service.”
