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Microsoft Sponsors Antiphishing Bakeoff

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the here-phishie-phishie dept.

uniquebydegrees writes, "InfoWorld is blogging about the (predictable) results of a Microsoft-sponsored antiphishing technology bakeoff. From the TechWatch blog: 'Microsoft's Phishing Filter (MPF) in IE 7 Beta 3 received the highest "composite score" at 172, followed closely by NetCraft's toolbar with a composite score of 168. But when you dig into the numbers, another story emerges... IE's MPF antiphishing toolbar doesn't top out any of the individual tests that make up the composite score... So how did MPF end up on top?... Microsoft didn't do the best job of spotting phish sites, but it did do the best job of blocking the ones it did spot, and blocking was what garnered the most points... Blocking a phishing Web site earned you twice as many points as just warning about it in this test, but is blocking really twice as effective as just warning users?'"

2 of 94 comments (clear)

  1. BS composite scores didn't make a huge difference. by dtfinch · · Score: 3, Informative

    Disregarding their arbitrary scoring BS, and only looking at detection percentages, IE7 still did a good job, as expected from a Microsoft commissioned study.
    GeoTrust TrustWatch caught 99%, but had a 32% false positive rate.
    IE7 - 89%
    Netcraft Toolbar - 84%
    EarthLink ScamBlocker - 64%
    Firefox/Google - 53%
    eBay Toolbar - 46%
    Netscape 8.1 - 28%
    McAfee Site Advisor - 3%

    How they came out with only 89% when they selected the sites themselves is anyone's guess.

  2. Re:Do a lot of people still get phished? by xenoarch · · Score: 3, Informative

    untill December of last year i was a sysadmin for a large ISP, and when i left we still had 30+ phsing scams caught per day. Phishing is a social hack, and those are always more effective then just plain tech hacks. And yes blocking is more effective then warning.