Netcraft Releases Anti-Phishing Toolbar

AgainstHate writes "Netcraft has released an Anti-Phishing Toolbar that provides detailed information about the website you are visiting (sites' hosting location, country, longevity and popularity) at all times to help users to validate fraudulent URLs. It also natively traps cross site scripting and other suspicious URLs. The toolbar also enables users to report phishing attacks to Netcraft, thus blocking any other unsuspecting users from being harmed (Netcraft supervisor validation is used to contain the impact of any false reporting). Currently the toolbar is only available for IE but a Firefox version is under development."

Comments

For Firefox...

[excaliber19]

Not perfect by any means, but sure helps:

Firefox SpoofStick Extension

Spoofstick

[BobMD]

Already available from Corestreet for Firefox and IE http://www.corestreet.com/spoofstick/

Adware?

[plover]

Not necessarily: did you read the EULA?

8 Advertising and sponsorship

Part of the Toolbar may contain advertising and sponsorship. Advertisers and sponsors are responsible for ensuring that material submitted for inclusion on the Toolbar complies with relevant laws and codes. We will not be responsible for any error or inaccuracy in advertising and sponsorship material.

So, be warned: it may contain some kind of adware, and it may be the kind you find hard to ignore. I'm not installing it until I know more.

Re:Nostradamus Predicts

[computational super]

Hmmmm... I'm almost afraid to admit this, but I'm a Firefox user who might be able to use this. There's a lot of information there that I've never been able to figure out how to determine using publicly available resources. According to TFA, Netcraft will report site, domain, ip address, country, date first seen, organization, last reboot, netblock owner, site rank, name server, DNS admin, and reverse DNS. Obviously I can use nslookup to figure out the IP address, and internic.net to look up the domain and figure out name server, dns admin, etc. but country? netblock owner? Date first seen?

The example shown in TFA, for example, shows netcraft.com being hosted in the UK... obviously, this is more sophisticated than just checking to see if the domain is co.uk. It seems like they actually are providing some value by maintaining a database... figuring out the hosting country from an IP address is supposed to be impossible.

Of course, I'm not downloading anything until I've seen it reviewed for a while to see if the database they're maintaining is useful in any way, shape or form - if 99% of the sites aren't in their database (and they're just showing me WHOIS lookups), then yeah, I guess I fall into the "don't really need it" category.

ah more toolbar hell...

[Anonymous Coward]

As if there wasn't enough screen space taken up already.

Switch to Firefox and enable the non-spoofing features and you don't need a toolbar (don't allow URL to be hidden, etc.)

In firefox, type in about:config
then set these to TRUE and never be "fooled" again:

recommended:
disable_window_open_feature.locati on
disable_window_open_feature.status
disable_wi ndow_open_feature.titlebar
disable_window_status_ change

optional:
disable_window_move_resize
disable_w indow_open_feature.close
disable_window_open_feat ure.directories
disable_window_open_feature.menub ar
disable_window_open_feature.minimizable
disab le_window_open_feature.personalbar
disable_window _open_feature.resizable
disable_window_open_featu re.scrollbars
disable_window_open_feature.toolbar

This is sure driving NetCraft's Ad Revenue...

[Christopher_G_Lewis]

OK, I'm a WinXP user, SP2, pop-ups turned completely off, run SpyBot, AdAware and look at my BHO's at least once a week because I don't trust computer programs, even though/because I write them for a living...

Installed it, read the instructions and FAQ (I know, I'm not supposed to do that :-), and have a couple of first impressions. I'm going to apply the "Mother Test" to the tool bar to evaluate it's usefullnes.

The tool bar installs with initally two items, Netcraft, and Services. Services is simply a drop down with links to all of Netcrafts services, trying to drum up business. I initally thought that services would hot link to some of the Netcraft tools like uptime and what is that site running, but no, just links to the main pages for them. There are 7 main items under serives, and 19 sub-items. Offerings
are impressive, but I don't think my mother would care at all about Hosting Providers or Web site auditing.

I can't evaluate the pop-up blocker since I have pop-ups completely turned off via XP SP2. I also run the Google toolbar, so pop-ups haven't bothered me in quite some time (except those occational ones that sneak through when you hold down the ctrl key to click a pop-up link. Who ever thought of using the same key to allow all pop-ups and allow one pop-up should be shot.)

As for the phishing, looks like it will work fine. The toolbar will have to pull down a new definitions file every couple of hours (2 by default), but that should be fine. Reporting a site is relatively easy. This is a thumbs up for the Mother Test

The Stats that it displays are pretty worthless. Pretty flags, but other than that, who cares. Rank is meaningless unless they get rid of their own sites. Pretty obvious that the most visited site is http://toolbar.netcraft.com.

The thing that most disturbs me are the stats that are gathered: http://toolbar.netcraft.com/stats/topsites
*Without*any*privacy*statement*, I have no idea what they are doing with my browsing information. This certainly scares me enough to uninstall this sucker. I understand that privacy is going away, I just like to fight it tooth and nail. (Except google, their cool. Until their IPO. oh wait... :-)

Oh yea. Regarding my subject: look at line 12 of the stats:
Rank Site First Seen Netblock Site Report Country
12 http://banners.netcraft.com June 2003 Netcraft Go UK