Browser Security News

More than a month after Microsoft released a study recommending its browser’s anti-phishing features, the Mozilla Foundation struck back on Tuesday with a survey using different data, and unsurprisingly, came up with different results.

Using 1,040 phishing sites flagged by the open PhishTank database over a two-week period, the Mozilla Foundation found that Firefox 2.0 blocked 79 percent of the malicious sites just using the local black list of phishing URLs and blocked 82 percent of phishing sites using the real-time Google filtering feature. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7’s anti-phishing features blocked only 66 percent of the sites with its auto-check feature enabled and only 2 percent with the autocheck feature disabled.

The Mozilla Foundation commissioned business strategy firm SmartWare to conduct the test of the anti-phishing filters in its Firefox 2.0 browser and in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 7 browser. Security testing firm iSec Partners certified the testing methodology. Microsoft, Mozilla compete on anti-phishing data