The latest browsers from Microsoft and Mozilla, IE7 and Firefox 2.0, promise to protect you from phishing sites trying to steal your data. But a new report shows just how hopeless and unreliable both browsers are at this task. Psst… we’ve found a product that does the job much, much better – and it’s free!
A report in the Washington Post goes into great detail in a new report from SmartWare showing that in their tests, quote: “Firefox blocked 243 phishing sites that IE7 overlooked, while IE7 blocked 117 sites that Firefox did not”.
If you read the original article, there are plenty of other stats, there’s information on default settings for the browsers and plenty more.
But let’s face facts: these results are terrible. They’re shocking and appalling. How is the average user supposed to have any idea how to configure their browser? Can they really trust that a site their browser says is safe, is actually safe?
What about the reverse? How many legitimate sites will be branded as untrustworthy by this anti-phishing feature which is clearly still stuck within the depths of buggy beta hell?
And in what may come as a shock to Internet users wanting the very fastest performance from their browsers, turning on the anti-phishing feature of IE7 actually slows things down quite a bit.
Turn the feature off, and your browser speeds back to life. You’d think this wouldn’t be a problem in the age of broadband, dual and quad core processors and gigabytes of RAM. But guess what, it still is.
There’s no question that an anti-phishing service is desperately needed on all modern computers. The thing is, it needs to be simple, safe and reliable. If it can be free to the end user, even better. If there’s a way for legitimate companies to validate themselves against this service, then bonus brownie points on top can be issued as well.
Of course the development work on anti-phishing technologies in browsers will continue, and one day, they’ll get it right.
Until then, my recommendation is to have a very good look at TrustDefender. Available from www.trustdefender.com, this software is free to download, free to use, has been through extensive beta testing and is available as an actual released product that has already gone through revisions and updates.
And it doesn’t rely upon working within a particular brand of browser, nor can it be easily hacked as browser based solutions can.
Don’t take my word for it. Check it out for yourself.
A free software solution exists to tackle the problem today. Why rely on buggy beta-level features in the latest browsers that are plainly half-baked, as so ably demonstrated in the reports and links above?
Are you serious, who and what the heck is TrustDefender. With all the good protection apps out there, this is your recommendation? Wow.
I never said to stop using your existing software protection, and I whole heartedly recommend using a range of protective software, just read through some of my previous posts where I talk about such things, including Windows Defender and much, much more.
And also, if you’d actually spent some time reading the TrustDefender website, instead of coming up with some smarmy comment, maybe you’d understand who and what the heck TrustDefender is.
Cheers
Alex.
I downloaded Trustdefender trial. Ther wasn’t any documentation that i could see either on download or onsite. Loaded it and was immediately locked out of the net via firefox, no matter what I did to the software as far as configs were concerned. I have been using the net since approx 93 when there was no gui and mostly on linux until recently, when I also use windows due to my digital photography.
The software is not GOOD either as when I had to try to install it, it just came back on reboot. I eventually resorted to stopping the service but even then it only came back, so I resorted to regedit under safemode.
I was NOT impressed with the way I was locked out and especially the way it would not uninstall. A beginner would be stuffed luckily I was not.
Hi Keith,
As part of the QA procedure, TrustDefender is tested on a large number of different environment. However it is virtually impossible to test every single possibility. We have lots and lots of users using TrustDefender with Firefox, so it seems to me that you are encountering a special problem on your computer that is for sure not typical or normal…
I would appreciate any help/information you could give us to investigate the problem and to make sure that it does not happen again. Please drop an email to support@trustdefender.com or click on ‘report a problem’ in the Software. Your help is much appreciated and will help us to improve the Software. Thanks.