Negative user reports have been confirmed by Intego, the IT security consultancy, as well as Michael Sutton, a security researcher from Xscaler, both of whom report the anti-phishing facility is not working properly.

Intego said it pulled data on phishing sites from Phishtank, a phishing warning site, and then visited the phishing affected sites using Safari and Safari Mobile to test the anti-phishing capabilities.

The IT security consultancy said that, whilst Safari spotted the potentially fraudulent sites, Safari Mobile failed to respond.

In its report, Intego said that since it posted an article about Apple's new anti-phishing function in Snow Leopar1, several sources have written about how it works.

"We have provided a comparison of Apple's anti-malware function and VirusBarrier X52, outlining some of the features that are present (or missing) in Apple's function."

The report said the researchers would now look at the anti-phishing function in more detail to describe exactly how it works and what it is capable of in terms of protecting Macs from malware.