McAfee has added anti-phishing protection to its free SiteAdvisor software.

Consumers who download the application which is a programme that sits on a browser and monitors and protects against adware, spyware, and spam - will get realtime early warning alerts against phishing scams.

The software does this bycomparing suspicious sites against known site blacklists and heuristically scanning other sites for any indicators that they may be recent and therefore unknown phishing sites.

SiteAdvisor can be downloaded from the McAfee site but those who are already signed up to SiteAdvisor will get this new feature updated automatically.