A Carnegie Mellon University study of anti-phishing toolbars has concluded that they are all pretty pesh.

Reports produced by  SmartWare & 3sharp –  companies that turn out to have been funded by Microsoft and  Mozilla – had claimed that Firefox or Internet Explorer 7 were great at detecting fake urls.  No prizes for guessing which company funded the report that came up with which finding. 

Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh – in a study funded by  rather more disinterested organisations including the US National Science Foundation and the US Army Research Office - looked at ten browser toolbars: Microsoft Explorer 7, eBay,Google, Netcraft (Mozilla), Netscape, Cloudmark (Mozilla), Earthlink,  Geotrust’s TrustWatch, Stanford University’s Spoofguard and McAfee’s SiteAdvisor.
The best performers were – Earthlink, Netcraft, Google, Cloudmark, and Explorer 7 – but these found only 85 percent of fraudulent websites.  This is a good score but far from paerect and coul;d give you a false sense of security. None of the others found more than 50  percent. McAfee’s SiteAdvisor ignominiously failed to identify any phishing sites.(Source:  TECHWORLD)