Netcraft's January phishing site competition saw the number of blocked phishing sites increase by a further 153,000, in contrast to last month's phenomenal rise of 277,000. Live progress of the latest competition can be tracked via the phishing site reporters list.

To continue showing 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 last month.

January's winners are: Abused, ER, Fully, cristal and Martin. 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 820,000 unique URLs reported to us as phishing sites.

A vulnerability in Adobe Reader was discovered early in January, which made sites that hosted PDF files vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks. Adobe recommends that users upgrade to the latest version of Adobe Reader to protect themselves against these kind of attacks, but it is worth noting that the Netcraft Toolbar automatically protects users against cross-site scripting attacks of the like typically employed by Internet fraudsters.

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 independent reviews by technology media and academic researchers, the free Netcraft Antiphishing Toolbar has been found to be more effective than antiphishing tools in IE7, Firefox 2 and other toolbars.

• Carnegie Mellon University Researchers (PDF): "We designed our first experiment to test the ability of each toolbar to accurately detect "fresh" phishing web sites identified within 36 hours of the experiment. ... The Netcraft Toolbar was the most effective, identifying 48 out of 50 phishing sites (96%)." The next best toolbar was only able to identify 34 (68%).
• CNet: "We found that IE 7 consistently failed to catch phishing sites less than 1 hour old, although IE 7 caught all phishing sites known for at least 1 hour or more. Most phishing sites are removed after their initial 72 hours. We found that stand-alone antiphishing filters, such as that from Netcraft, performed far better than IE 7 in flagging brand-new phishing sites."
• ZDNet: "In testing on live phishing sites, however, IE 7 RC1 failed to identify as many phishing sites as Netcraft's free IE toolbar."
• 3sharp: In a study funded by Microsoft, researchers at 3sharp found that the Netcraft toolbar blocked more phishing URLs than IE7 or any other toolbar tested. "Netcraft’s mature toolbar has clearly succeeded in leveraging Netcraft’s large existing database of Web servers to provide good anti-phishing protection. ... The Netcraft Toolbar also offers some useful features, like its Risk Meter, that may appeal to users who want to know more about the sites they’re visiting."

The Netcraft Toolbar Community is a giant neighborhood watch scheme for the Internet, empowering the most alert and security-aware members to defend the rest of the community against phishing frauds, which to date has blocked over 650,000 phishing urls aimed at customers of over 900 institutions.

Microsoft has licensed Netcraft's Phishing Site Feed for use in its Microsoft Phishing Filter Service, providing users of Internet Explorer 7 protection against the latest phishing attacks reported by the Netcraft Toolbar Community.

Microsoft's inclusion of Netcraft data in the Microsoft Phishing Filter was announced by Microsoft chairman Bill Gates during his keynote speech today at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, which introduced new security intiatives by Microsoft.

The Netcraft Toolbar Community is a giant neighborhood watch scheme for the Internet, empowering the most alert and security-aware members to defend the rest of the community against phishing frauds, which to date has blocked over 650,000 distinct phishing urls aimed at customers of over 900 institutions. In independent reviews by ZDNet, CNet and academic researchers, the free Netcraft Antiphishing Toolbar has been found to be more effective than antiphishing tools in IE7, Firefox 2 and other toolbars.

New York Internet, Web.com and iWeb8 Technologies are the most reliable hosting companies for January 2007, followed closely by 1&1 Internet AG, OLM, WestHost, Jumpline and Kattare.

New York Internet, a colocation specialist, also tied for the best performance last month, and has now finished atop the survey nine times since 2003. Web.com, which specializes in small business hosting, makes its first appearance at the top of the list since 2005, when it was known as Interland and was Most Reliable three times. iWeb8 is a Montreal-based hosting provider that also rebranded in 2006 (it was previously known as iWeb Technologies). iWeb8 is a public company that has grown through acquisition, buying eight other hosting companies since 1998.

Six of the 10 most most reliable hosts run their web sites on Linux, while three use FreeBSD and one is powered by Windows.

In the February 2007 survey we received responses from 108,810,358 sites, an increase of 1.93 million from last month. Apache has a decline of 442K sites this month, and sees its share of the web server market slip by 1.47 percent to 58.7 percent. This is the first time Apache's market share has been below 60 percent since September 2002.

Microsoft-IIS gain 935K sites, continuing an advance that has seen Microsoft steadily chip away at what once seemed an insurmountable lead for Apache. In our Feb. 2006 survey, Apache held 68% market share, giving it lead of 47.5% over Windows (20.5% share). In this month's survey, Microsoft's share has improved to 31.0%, narrowing Apache's advantage to 27.7%.

New York Internet and ThePlanet are the most reliable hosting companies for December 2006, followed closely by Navisite, OLM, Rackspace and Hostway and GoDaddy.

The strong showing provides an immediate return on infrastructure upgrades by The Planet, which recently added multiple high-capacity 10 Gigabit Ethernet connections with its connectivity providers. The upgrade was part of The Planet's integration with EV1Servers, which were both acquired last May by private equity firm GI Partners.

New York Internet has now finished atop the survey eight times since 2003, and has regularly been among the top 10 performers. The colocation and managed hosting specialist is located in Manhattan's financial district. The top two finished just ahead of Navisite, a growing managed hosting provider with operations in the Boston area and India.

Five of the 10 most most reliable hosts run their web sites on Linux, while two use FreeBSD and three are powered by Windows.