The Netcraft Toolbar blocked more than 41,000 phishing attacks in its first year. To get the new year off to a good start, Netcraft will send a top of the range iPod [or item of equivalent value for anyone who has already received a “Thanks for all the Phish” commemorative iPod from Netcraft] to the five people who have the largest number of phishing reports accepted during January, and a Netcraft sweatshirt to the 50 people with the next largest numbers of accepted reports.

To track the progress, we have created a leaderboard displaying the people with the largest number of accepted reports so far in January, identified by their first names to preserve their anonymity.

Including the toolbar community itself and customers of ISPs using our Phishing site feed, well over a million people are protected from phishing by the Netcraft Toolbar.

The Netcraft Toolbar is available for both Internet Explorer and Firefox, and serves as a giant neighborhood watch scheme for the Internet, in which 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.

Reporting a Suspicious URL

When you visit a page that you believe to be a phishing site, or contains fraudulent or deceptive content, we ask that you report it so that other toolbar users will benefit from your vigilance. The more sites that are reported, the more useful the toolbar will become for everyone.

You can report a URL by clicking on “Report a Phishing Site” in the toolbar menu, accessed by clicking on the Netcraft logo:

After you report a URL, Netcraft will review the report and block the page if we confirm it as part of a phishing attack.