Secure yourself from Phishing attacks with NetCraft Toolbar

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Last week a close friend of mine turned out to be a victim of Phishing scam and understandably was very upset. Phishers send well crafted emails as if coming from a valid source like your bank tricking you to enter your bank account or any portal (like eBay or Paypal) details including login and password or PIN numbers . Once, you enter the details, they are sent to remote servers. Now, that’s more than anything for the hackers to loot money out of your account.

Taking seecurity seriously, we will discuss the community aided Netcraft tool bar for Internet Explorer & Firefox. First of all, I have to applaud NetCraft toolbar as by far the best toolbar that you can get for free. When I tested a new eBay scam email URL, no other toolbar other than NetCraft can catch the Phishing URL.

The NetCraft 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).

Download and install Netcraft for Internet Explorer & Firefox from here