The study, commissioned by Microsoft, ranked Internet Explorer 7 Beta 3 with Phishing Filter as the best in overall accuracy for stopping phishing attempts.
The software giant’s new version of IE 7 finished ahead of anti-phishing utilities from Netcraft, Google, eBay and Geotrust.
“Over the last few years phishing has become a much bigger problem,” 3Sharp’s senior partner Paul Robichaux said. “Phishers have become more sophisticated and brazen in their attacks, and they’re getting better at fooling people.”
3Sharp’s testing methodology created a composite score for each technology based on both its accuracy in catching real phishing websites and its error rate in incorrectly blocking legitimate websites. IE 7 scored a 172 out of a possible 200. The Netcraft Toolbar finished second with a score of 168.
Microsoft and Google registered zero false positives.
The rest of the results list in order of finish are Google Safe Browsing on Firefox, eBay Toolbar, Earthlink ScamBlocker, GeoTrust TrustWatch, Netscape 8.1 and MacAfee Site Advisor.
“Early phish were pretty rudimentary, but today’s phish are often very realistic, and they’re getting better all the time,” Robichaux said. “To protect users from this dynamic threat, our study results show that the best browser-based anti-phishing protection offered today uses a combination of heuristics and a broad set of regularly updated data sources.”
Despite the study having been commissioned by Microsoft, Robichaux said the study was fair and impartial. A detailed breakdown of the test can be found on 3Stream’s official website.
“I’m pretty confident in saying that we did a fair evaluation and it happened in this case the Microsoft’s product came out on top,” Robichaux told InternetNews.com. “Netcraft was not involved and they did very well in this study as well. Microsoft was willing to let the results speak for themselves.”