Netcraft’s November phishing site competition saw the number of blocked phishing sites go beyond 400,000. Progress of the latest competition can be tracked via the phishing site reporters list.
To show our appreciation to the community, Netcraft will be sending a top of the range black 80gb iPod video to the five people who reported the largest number of phishing reports accepted during November.
November’s winners are: Robb, Martin, Cris, TomDe and DavidCh. Many thanks for your efforts! Each phishing site that is reported vastly reduces the number of victims falling prey to fraudulent activity on the Web. Netcraft has now received, reviewed and blocked more than 400,000 unique URLs reported to us as phishing sites.
The Netcraft Toolbar, which is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, serves as a giant neighborhood watch scheme for the Internet: members who encounter a phishing fraud can act to defend the larger community of users against the attack. Once the first recipients of a phishing mail have reported the target URL, it is blocked for toolbar users who subsequently access the URL and widely disseminated attacks simply mean that the phishing attack will be reported and blocked sooner.
In a manual evaluation of anti-phishing toolbars by Carnegie Mellon University’s CyLab last month, the Netcraft Toolbar was shown to be the most effective, identifying 96% of phishing sites. No phishing sites were incorrectly identified as safe.