An update to the Netcraft Anti-Phishing Extension for Mozilla Firefox is now available. This release replaces the Toolbar interface with a modern Button interface to sit alongside the browser’s address bar.
The upcoming Firefox 57 — to be released on the 14th November — represents a major overhaul of the browser, and removes support for legacy XUL extensions. Future versions of Firefox will only support the new cross-browser WebExtensions API.
The Netcraft Anti-Phishing Extension (known then as the Netcraft Toolbar) was first made available for Internet Explorer in December 2004. A Firefox version followed in May 2005. The current button-style Anti-Phishing Extension was released for Google Chrome and the Opera browser in 2012 and 2013 respectively. The new extension enjoys a 4.5 star rating on the Google Chrome Store.
The Extension runs on any operating system supported by the desktop version of Mozilla Firefox and displays the hosting location, country, longevity, popularity, and an abstracted risk rating for each site visited. In particular its key features are:
- Protection against phishing sites โ The Netcraft anti-phishing community is effectively a giant neighbourhood watch scheme, empowering the most alert and most expert members to defend everyone within the community. As soon as the first recipients of a phishing mail report it, we can block it for all users of the extension providing an additional level of protection from Phishing. Netcraft processes reports of fraudulent URLs from a diverse variety of sources and proactively searches for new fraudulent sites.
- Detailed site reports โ simply click the Netcraft logo to access a wealth of information about the sites you visit, helping you to make informed choices about their safety.
- Risk Ratings โ we evaluate the characteristics of the site compared against those depicted by fraudulent sites. The result is a simple visual summary displayed on the site report.
- Conveniently report suspected phishing & fraudulent sites โ At the click of the button you can report suspected web forgeries to Netcraft, helping to protect the community. Netcraft operates an incentive scheme for Phishing site submissions, including iPads, backpacks, mugs, and more… Over 38.4 million phishing sites have been detected and blocked by Netcraft since the anti-phishing service was launched (November 2017).
- Protection against cross site scripting (XSS) โ The extension optionally traps XSS and other suspicious URLs which contain characters highly likely to deceive.
The Extension is available for download from the Firefox add-ons page and requires no special administrator privileges to install. Users of the existing Netcraft Anti-Phishing Toolbar will be upgraded automatically to the latest version.
Versions of the Extension are available for other browsers on the Google Chrome Store and Opera add-ons page.
Customised versions with corporate branding and navigation are also available.