Overview

We've been actively working to test the effectiveness of the Phishing Protection feature in Firefox 2 as part of Mozilla's ongoing commitment to security. As an addition to Mozilla's community development and testing process, we initiated a program to test the effectiveness of this feature in an open, transparent and unbiased way. We're doing this to better understand how well Phishing Protection performs in flagging potential phishing attacks in general and relative to Microsoft's phishing filter in Internet Explorer 7. More information will allow us, as a community, to make good product decisions. This document outlines the basic testing methodology we used and the final test results.

This is just the beginning of a community-based project to actively monitor and test the effectiveness of our security measures. We're going to do even more, and we're actively recruiting people from the community to help. At the end of the day, our goal is to help make the Web safer for everyone. Please join the discussion at lists.mozilla.org.

Summary

* Firefox 2 Phishing Protection is more effective than the Microsoft Phishing Filter in Internet Explorer 7.
* Firefox 2 offers users a choice between local and remote protection modes.
* Firefox 2 Phishing Protection uses local mode by default, which protects user privacy.
* Even in local mode, Firefox 2 Phishing Protection is significantly more effective than the Microsoft Phishing Filter in Internet Explorer 7, operating in either mode.