Netcraft Toolbar - Protect you from Phishing attacks?

Netcraft Just release a Toolbar. The feature are :

Quote:

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[list=1][*]Protect your savings from Phishing attacks. [*]See the hosting location of every site you visit. [*]Help defend the Internet community from fraudsters. [/list=1]

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).

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Source : http://toolbar.netcraft.com/

Anyone test it?

Hmmm, not yet.

/me fires up the virtual pc


Sounds interesting... kind of like the First Alert spam 'ranking' system that works on community input. See Firetrust.com for more details on First Alert, I forget them (been a LONG time since I messed with it.) I'd be curious to see what Netcraft is doing to validate the ratings members give to messages, and if there is a remidiation process for incorrectly blackflagged messages. Is it possible for a Phisher to have an account and contest it when his messages are flagged, without there knowledge?

Just thinking out loud here. I'll go read up at Netcraft and report back.

Is this similar to the SpoofStick plug-in for Firefox? It sounds similar from what I see here, though spoof stick is meant to protect against the type of phishing that involves replicating a page content under a false website name [kinda like GMA|L and GMAIL or something].

I haven't tested it yet, but it looks to be very similar but specificly for I.E. and with a bit more information, maybe. I'll have Virtual PC running in a day or two, and I'll know more then.