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Netcraft Toolbar for Firefox Available

Posted by Zonk on from the making-the-net-safe-for-democracy dept.

miller60 writes "Netcraft has just released the Firefox version of its anti-phishing toolbar, which blocks known phishing sites and suspicious urls, and displays the hosting information and risk rating for visited sites. Toolbar users have submitted more than 5,600 phishing sites since the IE version was released in late December."

4 of 170 comments (clear)

  1. Petname toolbar by SiliconEntity · · Score: 5, Informative

    I'd also like to remind people about the Petname Toolbar from Tyler Close, which uses capability-security concepts.

    When you visit your bank site for the first time, you enter your own chosen "pet name" for the bank, which is like a nickname. Then when you (supposedly) visit the bank again via clicking on a link, it will show you the same pet name if it is the same site. If it is a phishing site you will see a glaring indication that the site is new and not one you have previously visited and trusted. This way you will know when you are at the site that you should be at.

    It is a simple concept and doesn't rely on any humongous database created by external users. For Firefox, available today!

    1. Re:Petname toolbar by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 2, Informative

      If a person is too stupid to realize whether or not they're logging into THEIR bank or not, perhaps they don't deserve the privilege of online banking.
      DNS spoofing
      Spyware host file poisoning.
      Spyware taking over your entire browser, pointing you to sites you don't want.
      IE bug where what you see in address bar is not the site you're on.

      Phishing is a comlicated problem with multiple vectors. Saying that a user that doesn't know all vectors at every given time is stupid is unwarranted.

  2. First Impressions by DanCentury · · Score: 5, Informative

    I wasn't too happy with it. I uninstalled it an hour or so after installing it.

    The anti-phishing feature ID'd just about every site I visited as a threat. In some cases it might be looking at images hosted on a different host, but I think it was choking on xhtml namespaces as well. I need to reinstall it too figure this out.

    I seems to add about 10-15 seconds to Firefox's start up time. I observed the same issue with the IE version. This was enough to uninstall the toolbar from both browsers.

    I value Netcraft's services, but I think I'll go directly to their site instead.

  3. It breaks tabbed browsing. by topher1kenobe · · Score: 4, Informative

    According to aebrahim's head it does some really bad things to tabbed browsing.

    --

    yadda