10 Million Phishing Attempts Thwarted Since October

This is such a cool story.

Two years ago, Bill Gates announced IE7 at RSA highlighting the Phishing Filter as one of its major features. Today, at RSA, we reported updated results on the Phishing Filter. Since IE7 launched in October, the Phishing Filter has blocked more than 10 million attempts to visit known phishing websites – and is currently experiencing a rate of over 1 million blocks a week. IE7 users and our data providers are adding nearly 10,000 Phishing sites every week to help protect our community of users.

[via IEblog]

I was sitting in a hotel restaurant last week, having a drink at the bar, and I overheard a guy somewhat loudly railing on IE7, that it was insecure and "buggy".  I couldn't help but throw my Evangelist hat on for a minute to hear him out.  It was evident after the first 15 seconds of talking with him that he had not even installed it, he was just "reporting things that are common knowledge."  I just happened to have my laptop with me, and walked through a couple of my favorite features. 

While I think I convinced him (and the rest of the patrons at the bar) that IE7 is just plain goodness, I really, really, really wished that I had this statistic at the ready while walking through the anti-phishing features. 

This is one of the "mother" features:  if my mother can encounter a feature and understand it without calling me, then it is all good.