Latest study rates all filters poorly, slates SiteAdvisor.
In two recent studies of anti-phishing technologies, one (sponsored by
Microsoft
) rated
Internet Explorer
highest, while the
second
(carried out on behalf of
Mozilla
) put the latest version of
FireFox
at the top of the list. Now a third, entirely independent study has said that all phishing filters miss significant numbers of suspect sites, are short on usability and suffer false positives.
The study, carried out by researchers at Carnegie Mellon University, used phishing data provided by the Anti-Phishing Working Group, including links taken from swathes of spam, tested both manually and using heuristics. The testers analysed the performance of a range of toolbars and other products, including technology from
NetCraft
,
Earthlink
,
Microsoft
,
Google
and
Cloudmark
.
NetCraft
and
Earthlink
both managed over 75%, as did Stanford University’s
Spoofguard
system, which also had an extremely high false positive rate at 38%. The researchers also said that all of the products tested had some usability issues, which could affect how effective they were in alerting users to phishing, and many were vulnerable to some ‘simple exploits’.
Firefox 2.0
was not included in the test set.
At the bottom of the heap lay
McAfee
‘s
SiteAdvisor
, with zero detection across the board. Similar figures were found by an earlier test which included
SiteAdvisor
, at which time
McAfee
denied having said that the standard version of
SiteAdvisor
included any element of phishing protection. With the product mistakenly included in a second study,
McAfee
announced that some erroneous information, carried on its site in an FAQ and mentioning phishing filtering in relation to
SiteAdvisor
, was a relic of a previous incarnation of the product before its acquisition by
McAfee
and has now been removed.
SiteAdvisor
‘s main aim is to spot sites carrying spyware and sending spam, while phishing protection, along with filtering of instant messaging and other vectors, is included in the enhanced
SiteAdvisor Plus
version.
Full details of the latest set of filter tests can be found (in PDF format)
here
.
Posted on 22 November 2006 by
Virus Bulletin
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