Netcraft Toolbar Catches Phish

One in 20 people fall for phishing scams and provide their account information to bogus versions of PayPal, EBay and other ecommerce sites, according to a study by Rachna Dhamija of the Harvard Center for Research on Computation and Society.

The study presented real online banking and fake phishing sites to subjects to see if they could tell the two types apart. ... The most sophisticated site caught out 90 percent of the 22 people participating.

I began using the Netcraft Toolbar in October, which works on Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox and detects known phishing sites and other suspicious pages. I've tried some of the phish links to see how well the toolbar works, and it has warned me about all of them.

Security · 2006/04/05 · 2 COMMENTS · Link

Comments

IE7 has similar technology built in, and it seems to work pretty well...

#1 · Mat Hall · 2006/04/06

I was talking to my net admin today about phishing and we were thinking about writing some software that will bombard these phishing sites with false information. Most people in the IT field already to this to a small extent, but if everyone started doing it on a larger scale, it would muck up their databases so much that the buyers might stop buying. I came up with the name Phish Phucking, though he thought it might turn some people away...

#2 · bobrocks · 2006/04/06