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Firefox 2.0 Wins Phishfight Against IE7
An anonymous reader writes "A new study that pitted the anti-phishing technology in Firefox 2.0 against that of IE7 generated some interesting results. From the Washingtonpost.com story: 'Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 overlooked, while IE7 locked 117 sites that Firefox did not.' Microsoft responded by pointing to its own supposed comparison study that put it in front of Mozilla and others in phish fighting, but the story notes: '3Sharp, the company that authored the Microsoft study, clearly state on their site that their goal in creating 3Sharp was "to use the robustness, flexibility, and sheer native capabilities of the Microsoft communication and collaboration technologies to enhance the business of our customers."'"
that most phising sites are designed to circumvent Internet Explorer, since it is the most common internet browser, and practically the only browser for 'clueless' users, especially the ones that would be victims to a phishing site.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
The risk of litigation inspired by false positives means they will always have to be a little more circumspect with who they classify as a phisher.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
/slap Microsoft
* Anonymous Coward slaps Microsoft around a bit with a large trout.
I win, I win!
It's really Google vs. Microsoft because Firefox 2 essentially integrated Google's Safe Browsing extension into the core browser. And while Firefox has the ability to change phishing-list providers (Tools -> Options -> Security), the only one it ships with is from Google.
Get Firefox!
The author of the piece suggests a whitelist must be more practical.
Hmm , so that would mean checking against a list of a few billion web
pages as opposed to a few hundred for the scam pages. Anyone spot the
teensy problem? I do wish that just occasionally journos would have a
small amount of knowledge in the area they're writing about.
And I thought a Phishfight is what happens after you criticize Trey for falling off his trampoline during a 'smokin' rendition of 'You Enjoy Myself'
He who knows best knows how little he knows. - Thomas Jefferson
Its pretty hard to miss.
Here is the hard-coded example of a phishing site from firefox: its-a-trap!.
The info is here
liqbase
They come and go very quickly. Shutting something down legally is a tremendous hassle. You have to go to a judge and get a court order to do it. You have to find the ISP responsible for hosting it, assuming its in a jurisdiction you can get a hold of. You have to get the ISP to pay attention to you in the first place.
It's probably a few hours of work, and then 30 seconds later the same site appears elsewhere. Marking it as "phishing" in a database doesn't have any due process protections, but it's not as severe as shutting it down.
...I've honestly ever seen the words "robust," and "Microsoft," in the same sentence.
The repeated crashes I had with FF2.0 all disappeared when I disabled the google toolbar add-in. With the integrated Google search, spellchecker and anti-phishing, there's very little for the google toolbar to do anyhow. Although, the buttons for finding/highlighting the search terms in the page are very useful.
...at least until they fix bug #356355 , which "jumps" the antiphising filter
fe, if you go to http://200.119.135.99/ebay/login5878/ the pishing filter will warn you
but if you encode the IP with a unusual encoding
http://0xc8.0x77.0x87.0x63/ebay/login5878/
the phising filter will not kick in
As the article points out, false positives were not addressed at all in this study. Without testing for false positives, those numbers are useless. If Firefox listed 100% of websites as phishing sites, the fact that it caught more than IE7 isn't all that impressive.
I get spam all the time... but I too had never seen this thing before. Just because people get spam and phishing emails doesn't mean they're dumb enough to click them. I don't even do it out of curiosity.
I teach a college course for teaching majors. Each year I do a phishing demonstration where I post a bunch of links on my blog, including one to the university's intranet. The links are all full paths (http://...), but the href in the intranet link points to a different server. When the students try to login, they get a message about phishing.
This semester I was a bit worried because I had heard IE 7 had new "anti-phishing technology." I thought IE would obviously check the text of the link against the target address, but that didn't happen. FireFox 2 doesn't either.
How hard would it be to check the text of a link against a regex for urls, then, if it is a url, check that the target is the same?
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.