My Anti Spyware

Netcraft Toolbar

Netcraft has a really nice toolbar which can provide visual clues as well as speed bumps to doing something unsafe. It can actually block access to a site pending user verification (ok so we all know most users click OK on anything that pops up to get it out of the way).
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).

Please download and try out the Netcraft toolbar.

Phishing scam and fake address bar

Viruslist blog reported about interesting Javascript.

This script runs maximized in the browser and presents the user with a window which looks like this:

As you can see, there is an Address field in the window which says “https://www.paypal.com/us”, but it is not the real browser address editbox! It’s a special field inside the Java applet which makes it look like it’s part of the browser window. Do note the real website address, as displayed by Opera - www.skycar.net.cn, in the blue bar. However, users who aren’t too careful about entering their PayPal data on websites might well be fooled.

Interestingly, Firefox doesn’t fall for this “trick” - it shows the fake “address bar” for a short time, then it hides it.