Why was I fooled? For one, it actually had my name in the email, and for another we as a magazine have been focusing on eBay for the last month or two as part of the investigative cover feature that adorns the current issue (eBay exposed). Could it be some sort of malicious attack from an eBay devotee, a paranoid part of my mind wondered?

So, with a deal of trepidation, I pressed the link – and was impressed to see how effective the combination of Mozilla Firefox and McAfee’s SiteAdvisor service is.

A huge red flash appeared in my browser window warning me that this site was considered to be a “web forgery”, and then I was auto-forwarded me to the SiteAdvisor page with the full description of its perils.

It’s a beautifully efficient system that just works, and if we’ve learnt anything from the McColo affair (where, after a big prosecution that took down US-based ISP McColo, spam fell by as much as 40% only to return to historic levels a matter of weeks later) it’s that cutting off the botnets doesn’t work – they’ll simply reappear.

You need to get rid of the commercial incentive of spam – and admittedly I’m talking “merely” about phishing-based spam here – which to my mind means integrating SiteAdvisor into every web browser out there. And updating to the latest web browser, not sticking with an old one out of habit or laziness.

In the meantime, if you haven’t, head over to the official SiteAdvisor site now for the free download.

The implication, of course, is that we’ve recommended their products. In one case, that we awarded them the title of Software of the Year 2007. And an innocent browser may be fooled – both sites look professional, with good design and a truckload of commendations.

Except, of course, that they’re commendations about an entirely different company. In the case of innoIT, the page of “genuine” quotes from customers actually bears a stunning similarity to those on the wholly reputable site from PC Specialist – which has actually earned any awards it displays.

This is just the tip of the iceberg. Colleagues from our sister site IT Pro were shocked to see a site with a not too dissimilar URL that had pretty much lifted the site wholesale, not even bothering to change the name of the staff who were writing the stories.

In fact, the only thing that had changed was the contact for advertising…

Naturally, the powers-that-be at Dennis Technology served that site with a cease-and-desist notice, but with it being owned by a foreign company and served on a foreign host, this is rarely going to get immediate results.

So what’s the conclusion? The obvious one is browse with cynicism, but there are tools out there that can help. McAfee SiteAdvisor may have its faults, on one occasion giving PC Pro a red rating the little terrors, but it rarely gives false positives.

I’d be interested to hear if anyone else in other industries has suffered similar problems. Identity theft on a corporate scale could be the next big thing…