Phishing emergence in online communications media allows scammers to reach many more people than ever before and at lower cost, whether through spam, e-mail and instant message scams; faked Web pages; or other online avenues. But the media usually focus on phishing’s consumer impact and seldom look at how various anti-phishing solutions affect the web site owners.
Being a victim of what I call “Anti-phishing Fraud”, it makes me feel wanting to find out how various anti-phishing solutions work. The official explanation for marking one of my pages suspicious according to Microsoft Phishing Filter FAQ is
A suspicious Web site has some of the typical characteristics of phishing Web sites, but it is not on the list of reported phishing Web sites. The Web site might be legitimate, but you should be cautious about entering any personal or financial information unless you are certain that the site is trustworthy.
In addition to IE7, the toolbar and browser solutions in the market include the offerings from EarthLink, eBay, GeoTrust, Google Safe Browsing using Firefox, McAfee SiteAdvisor, Netcraft, and Netscape. The accuracy of these solutions varies from good to useless. The latest study quoted on IEBlog based on Anti-phishing Accuracy Score indicates IE7 is the market leader in terms of accuracy.