Toolbar, search site aim to guard against phishers
By Elinor Mills
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
Published: September 25, 2005, 9:00 PM PDT

A Massachusetts company on Monday plans to launch a search site and toolbar that will alert Internet users when they are visiting Web sites that are fraudulent or should not be trusted.

The TrustWatch Search site and TrustWatch Toolbar, both provided free from Needham, Mass.-based GeoTrust, are designed to help protect people from unwittingly giving up their financial and other personal information to fake Web sites when shopping online or when targeted by phishing scams...The TrustWatch Toolbar provides real-time alerts, either red to signal that the Web site is unverified as being safe, yellow for caution, or green to indicate that it is verified and users should call the company first. People who want to shop online can use the TrustWatch Search Web site, powered by Ask Jeeves, and the results will show the same alerts.

The alerts also provide other information about Web sites, such as whether a site has been authenticated as trustworthy and has a Secure Sockets Layer certificate to safeguard data during transmissions. The system scans a Web site for fraud patterns and checks it against a blacklist of fraud sites. It also offers reviews and store ratings from shopping engine BizRate and information about how long the site has been online, how many other sites link to it, and a traffic ranking from the Alexa Web crawler.