Percentage of Blocked
Web Sites by the Leading Vendors
97.4% - BitDefender
97.0% - McAfee
94.8% - Kaspersky
92.2% - BullGuard
91.1% - F-Secure
Overall, eleven vendors’ products received three stars. For the vendors better known for their free
products, Avast and Avira received two stars, and AVG Technologies,one
star. No vendor received this test’s cone
of shame designation of “tested.” The
two lowest performing products were from eScan (57.7%) and ESET (58.0%). 574 phishing URL’s were part of the test. A nice sized sample.
According to SearchSecurity, phishing phishing is an e-mail fraud method in which the perpetrator
sends out legitimate-looking email in an attempt to gather personal and
financial information from recipients. Typically,
the messages appear to come from well-known and trustworthy Web sites. Web sites that are frequently spoofed by
phishers include PayPal, eBay, MSN, Yahoo, and BestBuy.
The users are typically directed to enter personal details at a fake
website whose look and feel are almost identical to the legitimate one.The FTC recommends that if you suspect you have been
phished, forward the e-mail to spam@uce.gov or call the FTC help line,
1-877-FTC-HELP.
How Prevalent is Phishing
In their July report for the
first half of 2012, the RSA Anti-Fraud Command
Center identified 195,487 unique phishing attacks – an increase of 19% over the
second half of 2011. The countries that
had the largest volume of phishing attacks were the UK (42%), Canada (29%), and
the United States (22%). The US hosted
the most phishing attacks, at 60%. The
Citadel Trojan was responsible for 20% of the Trojan attacks analyzed by
RSA.
For people who don’t think this is a business - the cost of a Citadel kit will run you $2,500 US. However, you'll soon have to be vouched for by a current customer to purchase the kit. RSA estimates that phishing attacks in the first half of 2012 could have potentially caused $687 million in total losses.
For people who don’t think this is a business - the cost of a Citadel kit will run you $2,500 US. However, you'll soon have to be vouched for by a current customer to purchase the kit. RSA estimates that phishing attacks in the first half of 2012 could have potentially caused $687 million in total losses.
Vendors in the test -
Avast, AVG Technologies, Avira, BitDefender, BullGuard, eScan, ESET,
Fortinet, F-Secure, G Data, GFI,
Kaspersky, McAfee, PC Tools, Qihoo, Sophos, Trend Micro, and Webroot.
Symantec wanted to choose which tests to participate in. That wasn’t an option. For the time being,
Symantec isn't in any of AV-Comparative’s tests this year. PC Tools, their wholly owned subsidiary, is, however.
About AV-Comparatives www.av-comparatives.org
AV-Comparatives publishes a number of free great test reports
over the year. You can review results
from their Real World Protection tests monthly. AV-Comparatives is an Austrian
Non-Profit-Organization. They provide independent
Anti-Virus software tests free to the public. You can probably win bar bets over the results, since the most well known vendors are often not the ones with the best test performance.
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