Internet Explorer 9 geared to effectively block Malware

NSS Labs, the leading independent security product testing organisation, recently shared the outlining of their comparative test results of malware protection in a 2-part document.

Whilst one part focuses on the global results, the other is specific to the Asia Pacific region. The outcome of the polls showed Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) as the most effective browser at blocking socially engineered malware, beating competitors by a large margin.

IE9 detected 96 percent of malicious links worldwide via its SmartScreen URL reputation feature, and another 3.2 percent when its Application Reputation feature was enabled. Next was Google Chrome 12, which caught 13.2 percent of the threats; Apple Safari 5, which detected 7.6 percent; Mozilla Firefox 4, which also detected 7.6 percent; and Opera 11, which found 6.1 percent.

While the web is a wonderful place, there are many dangers online that can put you and your computer at risk. The threat is even more imminent when it comes to business environments. The browser is the first line of defense against attacks from the web and it plays an important role along with anti-virus and other security software to help keep you safe online. The SmartScreen filter in Internet Explorer helps protect users from socially engineered malware attacks by stopping an attack before it has a chance to infect your PC. They stride to protect Windows customers by delivering a robust set of built-in security, privacy, and reliability technologies.

The SmartScreen filter in IE 9 includes Application Reputation and improvements to SmartScreen URL reputation. Internet Explorer 9 provides the first download manager with integrated SmartScreen malware protection and introduces Application Reputation. Application Reputation is a groundbreaking browser feature that uses reputation data to remove unnecessary warnings for well-known files, and show more severe warnings when the download has a higher risk of being malicious. Users today are often conditioned to ignore generic warnings that are shown for every download, and reducing the frequency of these warning by using reputation data has been shown to help customers make significantly better decisions. Other browsers show the same warning whether a file is an extremely common programme or a likely piece of malware. Internet Explorer 9 is the only browser that uses application reputation to help users make safer decisions. 

The graph below compares the test results from various browsers and shows that Internet Explorer blocks up to seven times more malware than other browsers in the global test.