10 Anti-Phishing Toolbars Evaluated

Can't decide which anti-phishing toolbar to use? Some browsers have this sort of technology built in while third-party vendors offer add-ons for free. But there are several of them so picking one might not be so easy.

Lorrie Cranor, Serge Egelman, Jason Hong, and Yue Zhang (of Carnegie Mellon University) conducted a test of 10 anti-phishing toolbars to see which ones work best in accordance with their testing methods. Tools tested include those provided by Cloudmark, Earthlink, eBay, GeoTrust, Google, McAfee, Microsoft, Netcraft, Netscape, and SpoofGuard.

The group created an automated test platform that checked effectiveness over a period of time. They tested for positive detection and false-positive detection. Based on what I've read it looks like some of the tools are less than 50% effective while 3 of the tools 75% effecitive and only 1 tool is better than 90% effective, and I’d bet that you can’t guess which tool that is!

You're going to have to read the report, "Phinding Phish: An Evaluation of Anti-Phishing Toolbars," (in PDF format) to see the results yourselves because I'm not going to spill the beans here. However I will say that this report goes to show that a multi-vendor solution is the best approach to security. But you already knew that...