Phishing has become a menace in the modern internet age. Phishing attacks usually begin when the crooks send e-mail messages to you that seem to come from your bank. But the links inside the message direct you to the phishing sites that look just like bank’s real site. And when you enter your banking credentials, the phishing sites steal them and redirect you to real site so that you do not suspect anything. There are many safety precautions that you can take to prevent yourself from become a victim of phishing – for example, you can check the email message headers to find out the real domain that sent the message, you should not click on any links inside the emails, you should always carefully type the bank’s site address manually in your browser, you should have a good antivirus software with web scanner (like avast!) installed on your system – to name a few.
For an additional layer of security to ward off such phishing attacks you can also make use of the Netcraft Anti-phishing extension. This extension is available for both the Google Chrome web browser and the Mozilla Firefox browser. After the installation of the extension, when you launch a website – the Netcraft anti-phishing extension shows you the risk level (on a scale of 0 to 10, 0 being totally risk free and 10 being extremely risky). It also shows you the year of inception of the site, its Netcraft rank, country of hosting and the web hosting provider.
Although the rank rating should give you ample idea about the phishing nature of the site, but you can also click on the Site Report link to view much more detailed information about the website. In general, a low rating site is a safe site. Sometimes, Netcraft can give a rating of 1-3 even for known legitimate and safe sites, but this is due to their internal rating system update algorithm.
Conclusion: Netcraft anti-phishing extension can give you a second opinion about the safety of a website using their safety rating system. But they use a convoluted rating system and it can sometimes show safe sites as risky.
You can get the Netcraft Anti-Phishing Extension from http://toolbar.netcraft.com/.