McAfee in anti-phishing confusion

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.

22 November 2006

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