I have been using the software program Site Advisor from McAfee for about six months now, and I like it very much. So when I saw Netcraft, I thought I would take a look at it. Netcraft is a toolbar that advises the user of bad sites that you may not wish to visit. It is community driven, which means that it is the users who provide the data for bad websites. The program is free and is simple to download and install.

On their site they describe Netcraft as:

The Toolbar community is effectively a giant neighbourhood watch scheme, empowering the most alert and most expert members to defend everyone within the community against phishing frauds. Once the first recipients of a phishing mail have reported the target URL, it is blocked for community members as they subsequently access the URL. Widely disseminated attacks (people constructing phishing attacks send literally millions of electronic mails in the expectation that some will reach customers of the bank) simply mean that the phishing attack will be reported and blocked sooner.

The Toolbar also:

• • Traps suspicious URLs containing characters which have no common purpose other than to deceive.
  • Enforces display of browser navigational controls (toolbar & address bar) in all windows, to defend against pop up windows which attempt to hide the navigational controls.
  • Clearly displays sites’ hosting location, including country, helping you to evaluate fraudulent urls (e.g. the real citibank.com or barclays.co.uk sites are unlikely to be hosted in the former Soviet Union).

For more information and to try a free download of Netcraft, take a look here.

If you have tried this free software, let us all know what you think.

Comments are welcome.

[tags]netcraft, free, software, anti-phishing, [/tags]