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Microsoft study confirms: IE7 rules!
How stupid does Microsoft think we are?
The company today touted a study by 3Sharp that compares eight anti phishing technologies. The study was commissioned (as in paid for by) Microsoft. Amazingly, Internet Explorer 7's phishing filter is found to be most effective anti phishing technology around, ahead of Netcraft and a Google plugin for Firefox.
You would hope that Microsoft at least put some effort in publishing it blatantly skewed research. 3Sharp is a technical marketing firm with ZERO experience as a technology analyst.
The study was performed by Paul Robichaux (photo), who is a software developer and messaging architect specializing in Exchange. After all, writing code and conducting credible research studies are very similar.
Reading the "test methodology" section of the study (PDF download) clearly shows that the test was designed to make IE7 look its best.
A group of 500 control URLs was verified against the IE7 filter to ensure that it didn't contain any false positives. And then in the results, the report trumpeted that IE7 didn’t report any false positives. Isn't that amazing?
The report also values a service that blocks access to a phishing site at double the rate of a service that merely warns the user. IE7 just happens to fall in the first category while GeoTrust falls in the second one. Never mind that Geotrust caught 99 per cent of the phishing sites (but gave false positives on about one third of the legitimate URLs) and IE7 only 89 per cent.
Furthermore, the test only fed 100 phishing URLs into the system, which raises some serious questions about the statistical significance of the findings. Any researcher analyst would know that, but then a true research study probably wouldn't produce such pro-Microsoft results.
Microsoft's marketing department seriously underestimates the intelligence of its customers. Or could it be that their own IQ is severely lacking?
Microsoft pulls another Pinocchio.
technorati tags: microsoft, IE7, phishing, research, paid+research, 3sharp
September 28, 2006 at 06:11 PM | Permalink
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