Netcraft’s October phishing site competition saw many internet users continuing to battle it out to gain a top spot in our phishing site reporters list.

During October, alert members of the Netcraft Toolbar community discovered a clever attack against the popular social networking site MySpace. Other users of the Netcraft Toolbar were promptly protected against this convincing attack, which used MySpace’s own servers to present a spoof login form.

To show our appreciation to the community, Netcraft will be sending a top of the range “Thanks for all the Phish” commemorative iPod to the five people who reported the largest number of phishing reports accepted during October.

The winners are: Les, Cori, Robb, DavidCh and Leo. 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 275,000 unique URLs reported to us as phishing sites.

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 recent reviews Ziff-Davis comments “In testing on live phishing sites, IE 7 RC1 failed to identify as many phishing sites as Netcraft’s free IE toolbar. ” while the Washington Post remarked “I’ve visited countless phishing sites in the past few months, and Netcraft’s toolbar has done its job almost unfailingly.”