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.