McAfee’s Phoney Phishing
Tuesday, November 21st, 2006McAfee has been forced to backtrack on claims that one of its products was misrepresented in a test of anti-phishing toolbars.
According to McAfee, last month’s Microsoft-sponsored report by researchers 3Sharp, which rated the software as poor at detecting phishing websites, was unfair because the version of SiteAdvisor assessed had never been designed to perform this function.
The company also said 3Sharp had refused to remove SiteAdvisor from the study, despite its requests to do so, resulting in the product receiving an embarrassingly low score of only 3 out of a possible 200.
At the time of the tests, SiteAdvisor was described on the company website as having phishing as one of its features. It also had a degree of anti-phishing capability before the company was acquired by McAfee in April this year. But it now appears that McAfee quietly removed or scaled back this capability without telling the world, generating confusion over its abilities.
Techworld.com - Security News - McAfee faces phoney phishing claims
That’s just entertaining - in a sad way *snickers* - but it begs to ask something almost entirely off the topic. Can vendor supported studies be trusted and - if not - who will pay for studies? Should they be trusted? Sure. There is a gaping maw between what should be and reality often times.
It is my opinion the majority of studies can be trusted when they come from third party non-biased groups even when sponsored by the vendor. What I feel probably can’t be trusted is the favorable spin then placed on those studies, the criteria studies are often forced to follow, and the resulting evidence being touted as proof.
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