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Firefox 2.0 Wins Phishfight Against IE7

Posted by Zonk on Tue Nov 14, 2006 10:47 AM
from the hi-ya dept.
Security Internet Explorer Mozilla The Internet
An anonymous reader writes "A new study that pitted the anti-phishing technology in Firefox 2.0 against that of IE7 generated some interesting results. From the Washingtonpost.com story: 'Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 overlooked, while IE7 locked 117 sites that Firefox did not.' Microsoft responded by pointing to its own supposed comparison study that put it in front of Mozilla and others in phish fighting, but the story notes: '3Sharp, the company that authored the Microsoft study, clearly state on their site that their goal in creating 3Sharp was "to use the robustness, flexibility, and sheer native capabilities of the Microsoft communication and collaboration technologies to enhance the business of our customers."'"
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Firefox 2.0 Wins Phishfight Against IE7 50 Comments More /

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  • You have to consider... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by otacon (445694) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @10:50AM (#16838300) Homepage
    that most phising sites are designed to circumvent Internet Explorer, since it is the most common internet browser, and practically the only browser for 'clueless' users, especially the ones that would be victims to a phishing site.

    • Re:You have to consider... (Score:5, Funny)

      by flyingsquid (813711) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @10:56AM (#16838398)
      Also, should "www.firefox.com" and "www.mozilla.com" really be included in IE7's tally of phishing sites blocked?

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by LiquidCoooled (634315)
      I thought the aim of a phishing site was to circumvent the user?
      Its not specifically aimed to run a machine exploit (though some will involve overflowing the address bar), but to convince the user they are on a site they assume is safe.

      slashdot.com.au might get some folks others might be fooled by slashdot.info or some other variation (like the whitehouse.com former porn site).
      The attack vector is all in your head.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by frodo from middle ea (602941)
      I never get this argument...
      If Linux/Firefox/(your favorite OSS product) was as popular as Windows/IE/(any proprietary Product), it will be attacked more, and will be equally vulnerable and would have equal # of security flaws.
      Fact is I don't care, What I want is something that is secure and really don't care if it is not as popular. In fact, "security by insignificance" works for me.

      • Re:You have to consider... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by foamrotreturns (977576) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @12:09PM (#16839644)
        No, you are dead wrong. Firefox gets patched more often, and since it is open source, that is the main reason that vulnerabilities are being found in it. Sooner or later, all the bugs in Firefox will be ironed out, and it will be considered bulletproof, while IE remains closed source and unavailable for third party code audits, which leaves it wide open to security breaches. Wouldn't you rather have a house that was built by one contractor and then inspected by thousands of others who were able to find and fix some issues with it than a house that was only inspected by the same contractor who built it? There is some correlation between popularity and number of exploits, but you make it sound like it's a 2-dimensional plane. It's not. There are other factors. The very same goes for Linux versus Windows. Until Windows and IE are open source, they will always be miles behind in security.
        BTW, security through insignificance is the same as security through obscurity, which is just a false sense of security. Just because something is out of the limelight does not mean that no one has the intention of messing with it.

        • Re:You have to consider... (Score:4, Insightful)

          by cosminn (889926) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @01:00PM (#16840468) Homepage
          Sooner or later, all the bugs in Firefox will be ironed out, and it will be considered bulletproof

          You must be new to software engineering :) This will never happen with any software. The only way that would be possible is if you freeze the code, then ONLY fix bugs. Even then you have the possibility of creating a new bug from fixing a bug.

          That's never going to happen tho. And the more features you add, the more bugs you add, regardless of open/closed source.

          My problem is not that bugs exist, it's unavoidable, it's how they're handled that's important.

        • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

          by owlstead (636356)
          "Wouldn't you rather have a house that was built by one contractor and then inspected by thousands of others who were able to find and fix some issues with it than a house that was only inspected by the same contractor who built it?"

          Are you trying to be funny? Because I would never like to live in that first house. First of all, it would never get finished, disputes will break out and I would never get one ounce of peace. Fortunately, even with such hugely successfull applications, the number of real develo

  • MS will always struggle here (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Timesprout (579035) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @10:52AM (#16838328)
    The risk of litigation inspired by false positives means they will always have to be a little more circumspect with who they classify as a phisher.

  • PhishFight! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday November 14 2006, @10:54AM (#16838366)
    /slap Microsoft

    * Anonymous Coward slaps Microsoft around a bit with a large trout.

    I win, I win!
    • IE7 is also incompatable with quickbooks 2004 and above. With the other problems I've heard of I have to ask why in the world is this POS being forced on users as a high priority security update?

      Intuit recommends uninstall. Just got that notice when I installed the latest QB update. Will Intuit learn from this? I've been reporting the bug of unable to run without power user (or higher user rights) in Betas for years.

  • Firefox, or IE7? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by smitty_one_each (243267) * on Tuesday November 14 2006, @10:55AM (#16838384) Homepage Journal
    Firefox, or IE7?
    Which way finds one
    The phish-free heaven?
    Let browser, like foam
    Be lynx: sans leaven
    Burma Shave

  • It's really Google vs. Microsoft (Score:5, Informative)

    by SimplexO (537908) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @10:57AM (#16838412) Homepage
    It's really Google vs. Microsoft because Firefox 2 essentially integrated Google's Safe Browsing extension [google.com] into the core browser. And while Firefox has the ability to change phishing-list providers (Tools -> Options -> Security), the only one it ships with is from Google.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by LiquidCoooled (634315)
      No, firefox ships with an automatically updating local database of phishing sites.
      You don't need to test every site with google, just use the built in one.

      Read more here [mozilla.com]

  • He mentions a whitelist. He must be joking. (Score:4, Interesting)

    by Viol8 (599362) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @10:58AM (#16838430)
    The author of the piece suggests a whitelist must be more practical.
    Hmm , so that would mean checking against a list of a few billion web
    pages as opposed to a few hundred for the scam pages. Anyone spot the
    teensy problem? I do wish that just occasionally journos would have a
    small amount of knowledge in the area they're writing about.

    • Re:He mentions a whitelist. He must be joking. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Timesprout (579035) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:05AM (#16838554)
      Actually he mentions a banking whitelist which is not a bad idea at all and not impractical to implement. In fact I can imagine in the future the banks will request this themselves as their liability incurred for customers duped by phishing scams increases.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by qbwiz (87077) *
        Would there be a <banking> tag in the source, so that those pages will be checked? I suppose we'd have to mark every site that doesn't have that tag as phishing (with big flashing lights, of course), just so a phishing site doesn't try to pretend that it isn't banking.

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by mattwarden (699984)

      I do wish that just occasionally journos would have a small amount of knowledge in the area they're writing about.

      Yeah, and I wish vicodin wasn't prescription-only. Talk about pie-in-the-sky!

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Bill Dimm (463823)
      First, it would be a list of domain names rather than webpages, so millions instead of billions. Second, it is only really important to whitelist sites where sensitive information is entered (banks, sites taking credit cards, etc.), so even fewer sites. Finally, the browser could cache the lookup results for the sites you've visited in the past, so it would only need to do a lookup when you visit a site you haven't been to before, like when you accidently go to mybanc.com when you should be at mybank.com.

  • Opera? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by elcid73 (599126)
    I didn't RTA, nor do I have OPera's 9.1TP installed with fraud protection, but I'd be interested in how it fares.

  • Phishfight (Score:4, Funny)

    by digitaldc (879047) * on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:00AM (#16838476)
    And I thought a Phishfight is what happens after you criticize Trey for falling off his trampoline during a 'smokin' rendition of 'You Enjoy Myself'

  • That's probably the first time... (Score:5, Funny)

    by petrus4 (213815) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:06AM (#16838580) Homepage Journal
    ...I've honestly ever seen the words "robust," and "Microsoft," in the same sentence.

  • Firefox antiphising is far from perfect... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by diegocgteleline.es (653730) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:11AM (#16838646)
    ...at least until they fix bug #356355 , which "jumps" the antiphising filter

    fe, if you go to http://200.119.135.99/ebay/login5878/ [200.119.135.99] the pishing filter will warn you

    but if you encode the IP with a unusual encoding

    http://0xc8.0x77.0x87.0x63/ebay/login5878/ [0x77.0x87.0x63]

    the phising filter will not kick in

  • Conspiracy time (Score:2, Insightful)

    by ChubZee (855708)
    This seems to me like another bonus for Google and Microsoft in tracking users browsing habits. If every time someone visit a site using FF2.0 or IE7 it 'phones home' to find out of the page is a phishing site or not, won't these companies be able to build a more concise and accurate profile of web users? Just a thought...

  • False Positives? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by aardwolf64 (160070) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:31AM (#16838958) Homepage
    As the article points out, false positives were not addressed at all in this study. Without testing for false positives, those numbers are useless. If Firefox listed 100% of websites as phishing sites, the fact that it caught more than IE7 isn't all that impressive.

  • They don't look for the obvious (Score:4, Interesting)

    by cvd6262 (180823) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:49AM (#16839310)
    I teach a college course for teaching majors. Each year I do a phishing demonstration where I post a bunch of links on my blog, including one to the university's intranet. The links are all full paths (http://...), but the href in the intranet link points to a different server. When the students try to login, they get a message about phishing.

    This semester I was a bit worried because I had heard IE 7 had new "anti-phishing technology." I thought IE would obviously check the text of the link against the target address, but that didn't happen. FireFox 2 doesn't either.

    How hard would it be to check the text of a link against a regex for urls, then, if it is a url, check that the target is the same?
    • What do you have against bassmasters.com?

    • Re:If these are known phishing sites... (Score:5, Informative)

      by jfengel (409917) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:04AM (#16838542) Homepage Journal
      They come and go very quickly. Shutting something down legally is a tremendous hassle. You have to go to a judge and get a court order to do it. You have to find the ISP responsible for hosting it, assuming its in a jurisdiction you can get a hold of. You have to get the ISP to pay attention to you in the first place.

      It's probably a few hours of work, and then 30 seconds later the same site appears elsewhere. Marking it as "phishing" in a database doesn't have any due process protections, but it's not as severe as shutting it down.
      • This is where whitelisting would be useful. Warn people when a site they are visiting is less than two days old (and probably isn't in Google cache). Mail servers could add links from spam messages automatically to a temporary black list so that they get added much faster.

        That would reduce the effectiveness of most phishing sites to almost nothing.

    • Re:A suggested improvement (Score:4, Informative)

      by LiquidCoooled (634315) on Tuesday November 14 2006, @11:01AM (#16838492) Homepage Journal
      Its pretty hard to miss.

      Here is the hard-coded example of a phishing site from firefox: its-a-trap! [mozilla.com].

      The info is here [mozilla.com]
      • Thank you! You see, I had never hit a suspected phishing site before! Thanks once again.

          • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

            by LiquidCoooled (634315)
            I get spam but delete it without ever clicking.
            I've learnt never to click links or open attachments in unsolicited mails.

          • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

            by ack154 (591432)
            Never get spam do you? Really?

            I get spam all the time... but I too had never seen this thing before. Just because people get spam and phishing emails doesn't mean they're dumb enough to click them. I don't even do it out of curiosity.

    • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

      by smooth wombat (796938)
      I suggest programmers introduce one that is clearly visible or change the color of the location bar background when such a site is hit.

      The clearly visible one would be better since there are people who are completely color-blind (i.e. see things only in shades of gray) or who are color-blind to certain colors.

      A combination of what you suggest would be the most effective way of getting someones attention since it would be color-independent. Have the address bar flash between two different colored b

    • Re: (Score:2, Informative)

      by Hijacked Public (999535)
      The people who sent the cake aren't the same people who decided to run a study. "Microsoft" is a vast corporation where each individual has distinct thoughts, plans, motives, etc.

      So no, it isn't weird.

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      by TheThiefMaster (992038)
      The repeated crashes I had with FF2.0 all disappeared when I disabled the google toolbar add-in. With the integrated Google search, spellchecker and anti-phishing, there's very little for the google toolbar to do anyhow. Although, the buttons for finding/highlighting the search terms in the page are very useful.
    • I'll take Firefox 1.5 without the phishing filter, thank you.
      Even though it doesn't crash for me, you can always disable [theden.ws] it in Firefox.
    • ...The SmartWare site isn't much better. (SmartWare is the company that did the study the WP article is based on)

      See for yourself: http://www.smartware.com/
    • If you disagree, tell me, why can't I disable this "phishing protection" completely?
      You can [theden.ws] if you're using Firefox.

    • Why is Opera continuously overlooked on slashdot?

      It's not, it's just that there isn't much to say about it.

      It's the best thing going out there but we still have to hear the endless wailing of fanboys defending FF and IE.

      This is my minimum requirements [google.com] for a browser. I don't mind if it's handled by another company like yahoo or such. When Opera/Konqueror and so on do have something like that, I'll consider them.

      I thought people here were suppose to stand up for a good product, not name brand loyalties.

      I don'

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