There are hundreds of toolbars out there to help enhance your Internet viewing. Many of them though are just carbon copies of the other. Some offer good things, others offer nothing. The Netcraft Toolbar is one of the good guys for sure. If you like to see information about what is going on behind a Web site’s server, then it could even be your very best friend.

The Toolbar community is effectively a giant neighborhood 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).

Yes, I know you probably already have six different toolbars in your Internet Explorer right now. I promise you, though, that the Netcraft Toolbar is worth at least trying out. It is totally free to download, so play around with it and let me know what you think.