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Mozilla Claims Phishing Win Over IE
David Utter
Staff Writer
2006-11-15
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The Mozilla development team tested Firefox 2 against Internet Explorer 7 to see which browser fared better at flagging phishing sites.
 | | "...and the winner is..." |  |
Using the available feed of phishing URLs from the PhishTank phish tracking community site, Mozilla arranged for third-party software tester SmartWare to put Firefox 2 and Internet Explorer 7 through their paces. After completing the test, Mozilla had iSEC Partners audit the testing methodology and results.
Just by virtue of Mozilla publicizing the test should indicate how Firefox fared against IE. Out of 1,040 phishing URLs tested, Firefox blocked 820 sites. IE stopped 690.
Sometimes one browser would identify a URL as a phish while the other one did not. Firefox blocked 243 URLs that IE let pass; IE stopped 117 URLs that slipped by Firefox. There were 65 URLs that neither browser blocked.
Firefox fared a little better when it used Google's real-time information rather than the local list of URLs from PhishTank. Firefox blocked 848 sites when running in its "Ask Google" mode.
The Firefox test came about in response to a study Microsoft commissioned that was reported in September. In testing against the previous version of Firefox, 1.5, IE7 fared best against it and other products compared during the study.
Mozilla's top security officer, Window Snyder, said in a statement that Microsoft's smaller sample size probably contributed to the different results.
"They only tested a 100 URLs--that's a really small sample," Snyder said. "So that might have impacted their results. Otherwise, the methodologies are pretty similar."
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Tags: Phishing, Mozilla, Microsoft
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About the Author:
David Utter is a business and technology writer for SecurityProNews and WebProNews.
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