Firefox better against phishing

According to research commissioned by the Mozilla Foundation, its own Firefox browser is more effective in shutting out phishing attacks than Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

Both Mozilla and Microsoft have released new versions of their browser software - Firefox 2.0 and IE7 respectively - and both companies were keen to emphasise new anti-phishing features that had been incorporated.

The Mozilla Foundation set out to ascertain just how effective the Phishing Protection feature in Firefox 2.0 was. At the same time it also examined the Phishing Filter within IE7.

"We initiated a program to test the effectiveness of this feature in an open, transparent and unbiased way... to better understand how well Phishing Protection performs in flagging potential phishing attacks in general and relative to Microsoft's phishing filter in Internet Explorer 7," Mozilla said in its report.

The two browsers' performance was observed when set the task of identifying known phishing websites. Software company SmartWare was the independent third party that carried out the testing.

Firefox emerged as the winner of the testing, blocking 82 per cent of the sites. Internet Explorer only managed to block 66 per cent of the phishing websites.

iSec Partners was asked to varify the integrity of the findings. "The methodology completed by Mozilla follows a fair testing process for functionality/feature testing... iSEC has determined that methodology used for the testing process can be considered a fair and unbiased approach," it said.

http://www.mozilla.org/
http://www.microsoft.com/
http://www.smartware4.com/
http://www.isecpartners.com/

More news via RSS Post item to Del.icio.us Post item to Digg.com