With the help of the SmartScreen filter, IE 8, Microsoft’s standard Internet browser prevented 1 billion malware attacks or downloads. In a Microsoft Windows Blog on Friday, Microsoft noted that the growing number of socially engineering attacks like malware are posing a greater threat on the Internet. They are one of the most common risks to people’s online safety. Having introduced malware protection in Internet Explorer 8 as part of the SmartScreen Filter it has been a very successful ad on to a commonly used product.
How it Works
First the SmartScreen Filter looks and evaluates the URLs coming into the website, it follows up with an inspection of the associated servers of origin. When the software spots a server as containing malicious content, SmartScreen displays a warning, saying that it is unsafe to browse to that respective site. The user is then given the opportunity to continue forward to the page or return back to their home page without downloading any content.
Here are some quick facts of interest about the Internet Explorer and malware as IE 8 hit this 1 billion blocks milestone:
* In August 2009 and March 10, the NSS Labs have recognized the Internet Explorer 8 SmartScreen Filter was a leader in protection against Socially Engineered Malware. The reports also compared Internet Explorer 8 to Firefox and Chrome, and others browsers.
* The SmartScreen malware filter blocking rates continue to improve because there is a continued effort to improve the SmartScreen service program at the back-end. In comparison, an August 2009 report showed that the filter blocked about 70 million attempts to download malware. This was about 18 million blocks per month. But at the time,Net Applications reported that only 15% of the Internet population used IE 8. Now speed forward. In the last two months, IE8 blocked about 100 million attempts to download malware. Furthermore, last month, according to Net Applications, the number of users of IE 8 was almost 26% of the Internet population. this translates to about more than 1.7 times more users working with Internet Explorer 8 than last August 2009; however, the blocking rare is 5 times more malware month on month.
Source:http://www.windows7news.com/
