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 and the community has been widely featured in the media from the Washington Post & Wall St. Journal through to Slashdot.
Thanks to everyone who has reported sites so far.
A new version of the toolbar is now available, with extensions including easy to see site risk ratings, faster browsing, and support for enterprise desktop rollouts.
Risk Ratings
In addition to blocking known phishing sites, the Netcraft Toolbar now displays a Risk Rating for all new sites it encounters. The Risk Rating – a user-friendly visual summary of the information displayed by the toolbar – evaluates new sites against characteristics of the phishing sites reported to date. Sites which are deemed safe will show a low Risk Rating, while riskier sites will show higher ratings based on a number of factors.
The above example shows a web site used to recruit people to withdraw money from compromised bank accounts. Although the site contains plausible content, the Netcraft Toolbar assigns a high Risk Rating because it is hosted under a newly registered domain, the site has never been seen in the Netcraft Web Server Survey, and the Chinanet Hebei Province network has hosted other fraud sites in the past.
The ratings will evolve and adjust automatically as phishers change their behavior, and along with pre-emptive blocking of cross site scripting, are particularly helpful to people who receive a phishing mail early on, before it has been reported by someone else in the community and blocked.
Protecting Enterprise Networks
The new version of the toolbar can now be run by ordinary Windows users without administrator or power user privileges. This new feature makes it simpler for administrators to deploy the toolbar across enterprise networks, offering real-time protection against phishing threats through automatic updates of the blocklist and Risk Ratings.
The list of sites blocked by the community and validated by Netcraft is also available as a feed suitable for proxy servers mail servers. Please contact us sales@netcraft.com for details.
Customized Branding and Navigation
Customized versions of the toolbar are available, providing banks, brokerages, credit card companies and ISPs a powerful tool to protect their customers and networks from Internet phishing scams while simultaneously building customer loyalty.
The toolbar can be branded with your logo and customized navigation links, served dynamically from the central server, giving clients the ability to update the toolbar to highlight new services, and other timely customer communication. Over and above the fraud fighting attributes of the toolbar, it is an extremely attractive branding and customer loyalty mechanism, as it keeps the clients’ logo and services on screen throughout the time the customer spends using the Web.
The cost per user is very favorable when compared with traditional web advertising, while the branded toolbar maintains contact with the user throughout the time they spend using the Web. If you would like to have a version of the Netcraft Toolbar branded for your organization, please contact us sales@netcraft.com for details.