Thanks for your thoughts Oldfrog. It sure seems that there's a lot of commonality here. OK granted, a SPAM is usually an unwanted commercial solicitation, while a Phish is a misrepresented solicitation of a more sinister nature.

However it seems the same techniques are used for either. And some motivations are common as well. SPAMers also strive for an air of legitimacy and neither do they want messages to be filtered nor traced.

Also, I'll bet that either type of sleezebag is highly motivated to promote and support the malware commonly found on many folks' computer systems. The battle being waged by CCSP and other such sites has some significant financial implications.

I have been impressed at the lengths to which some of the phishing sites have gone to achieve that "air of legitimacy". I visit most of the ones that I receive using SamSpade to first browse the code of the site so that I can see if any scripting is going to run. I have seen sites that served both images and links from the legitimate site as a part of the scam. The legitimate sites could prevent that with a small bit of mod_rewrite code in their .htaccess file.

_________________
MS MVP Security 2006-2008

I too have added the Netcraft Toolbar to my underused Internet Explorer. I have had very little occassion to use it yet. From the previous report, it seems to get fast results.
I have also installed the other one featured on the front page, the fraud eliminator toolbar which I have used to report a possible case of fraud regarding a post somewhere on the forum, where I tracked a link for another user in regards to spyware pop-ups. ***

Ironically enough, maybe because of these additions, the last time I ran a browser security check, Internet Explorer scored high marks all the way across the board in spite of the fact that on this PC I have not yet installed SP2 which was and is a disaster on my laptop. Microsoft has yet to mail the CD I ordered and tech support has been using English as a second language.
I personally look forward to these products being available for browsers other than Internet Explorer, and I also look forward to finally learning Linux OS.

*** Though slightly off-topic, I have added this in as this was what I reported as stated above.

_________________