Phishing has become a real blight on the Internet recently and we're forever hearing scare stories about innocent folk who have lost thousands after being duped by phishing scams.

For those that thought 'phishing' was the pursuit of illiterate angles, I'll remind you that it's actually the name given to an Internet scam whereby a bogus site poses as a real site in order to garner personal information, usually bank details, from unwitting users. For instance, a phisher may set up a site that looks very much like that of a real life bank and prompt users to come and confirm their account details. These sites are often mailed to people in the form of spam.

Thankfully the continued increase in this type of scam has resulted in the continued increase in the range of software designed to help you combat phishing. As you may recall, one of the improvements to Internet Explorer 7 was the inclusion of a phishing filter. Reasonable Anti-phishing aims to ramp up security a stage further and provides a bolt-on solution for IE users to make extra sure they don't get caught.

After a simple installation the program sits snugly in the Internet Explorer toolbar with its own Google-powered search bar. The program allows you to maintain a database of protected URLs that you know to be safe (and includes some of its own) and only when sites from these domains are loaded will the Anti-phising icon turn green. For unknown sites it stays yellow, and for known phishing sites you'll get a big red warning to stop you falling into the phisher's trap.

This app is much more powerful than the IE phishing filter, which only really lets you enable or disable it, whereas Reasonable Anti-phising gives you a whole raft of options and settings. These include the ability to set up up a 'do not warn' list, a log of reported phishing sites, domain name protection and webpage appearance protection.

It's only available for Internet Explorer users at present, but Reasonable Anti-phishing turns out to be much more than just a reasonable program. In fact, it's actually pretty good.