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The anti-phishing bars have become a very popular functionality in the navigators. The two most used, world widely speaking, Firefox and the new version of the Internet Explorer, include a series of systems to be able to detect fraudulent web sites. Also, there are other bars that can be inserted to almost every navigator but the effectively usually is not the expected. |
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“Finding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars” is an independent investigation made by the university Carnegie Mellon in Pittsburg, that tests ten different toolbars of anti-phishing. These are: Microsoft Explorer 7, eBay, Google, Netcraft, Nescape, Cloudmark, Earthlink, TrustWatch of Geotrust, Spoofguars of Stanford University, and SiteAdvisor of McAfee.
There have been several tests done that have proved the behavior of the toolbar throughout time, and its capacity to react to new threats. The same way that it has been tried to foul the technique toolbars of obfuscation of the URL. Although the simplicity of the solution to this kind of cheat, and in spite of all the different toolbars that use different techniques, most of the bars, such us Coudmark, Google, McAfee, TrustWatch, NetCraft and Netscape didn’t detect the trick.
The investigation concludes that even among the companies that could be defined as the most effective, such us Earthlink, Netcraft, Google, Coudmark and Internet Explorer 7, only detected 85% of the fraudulent web sites. The rest didn’t even get to 50% of detection, and the good results have to be measures with a high percentage of false positives.
Even though the inform assures that no toolbar can be considered as 100 per cent effective to defend the user, as a first step in defense an anti-phishing bar can be very helpful, it always helps to be critical in the ideas and suggestions. Without a question you shouldn’t trust completely in the veracity of a web site, because the same happens with the antivirus: the fact that the antivirus doesn’t detect a virus doesn’t guarantee anything. With the solutions of anti-phishing as the antivirus, only a detailed studio of each case can offer certain guarantees. |
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