Processing .....please wait.. 
The article has been forwarded.... 
IE9 best to block socially engineered malware
By siliconindia
|
Saturday, 18 December 2010, 00:35 IST
Bangalore: The most recent version of Microsoft's browser, Internet Explorer (IE) 9 is one of the best in protecting users from socially engineered malware, a test conducted by NSS labs confirmed. IE 9 and its previous version IE 8 has beaten rivals Apple Safari, Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Opera in blocking malware.
It was revealed that while IE 9 blocked 99 percent of socially engineered malware, IE 8 stopped 90 percent of the same. The next best was Firefox 3.6 accounting for just 19 percent malware detection.
Socially engineered malware is a growing menace on the web which dupes end-users into clicking a link that appears safe, leading them to execute damaging malware or sending them to websites hosting malware links. As per report by Trend Micro, 53 percent of malware is delivered via net downloads as compared to 12 percent delivered through mails.
A browser can act as the last line of defense from such a malware menace. Microsoft's success in this area is attributed to its SmartScreen URL filtering technology that keeps a tab on the sites visited by the users against a dynamic list of reported phishing and malware sites.
This technology is present in both IE 8 and IE 9. The reason why IE 9 leads ahead of IE 8 is because the newer version of the browser incorporates a SmartScreen application reputation service. The service alerts users against running or saving potentially dangerous software.
NSS labs acknowledged that the rest of the browsers, Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, all use the Safe Browsing data feed by Google to protect against socially engineered malware. However, they all scored differently in the test by NSS. While Firefox 3.6 blocked 19 percent, Safari 5 blocked 11 percent and Chrome 6 blocked only 3 percent.
The reason cited for this difference is that each browser may use the API differently thus determining the blocks differently.
