Internet Explorer is now the most secured browser? Well that’s according to an independent security testing organization, NSS Labs. Their results show that Internet Explorer leads the industry in protecting users against socially-engineered malware with Internet Explorer 9 (IE9) blocking 99-percent and Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) blocking 90-percent.
Socially-engineered malwares are those that exploit a person’s tendency to trust links received from friends usually from e-mails and social networking sites. Once a person clicks a poisoned link, they will risk giving control of their PC to malware creators or steal an individual’s identity.
Internet Explorer, which has blocked over 1.2 billion malware and fishing attacks, blocks almost five times more malware threats than Firefox, nine times more than Safari, and 33 times more than Chrome.
According to NSS Labs, “œwith a unique URL blocking score of 94% and over-time protection rating of 99%, IE9 was by far the best at protecting users against socially-engineered malware.”
Available through http://www.nsslabs.com/research/endpoint-security/browser-security/, the NSS Labs report reveals how Internet Explorer offers the best protection against socially-engineered malware.
Internet Explorer leads the industry in providing protection from socially engineered attacks through its SmartScreen filter. Building on the security features of its previous version, IE9 provides the first Download Manager with integrated SmartScreen malware protection and introduces SmartScreen download reputation, a 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. Other browsers show the same warning whether a file is an extremely common program or a piece of malware created literally minutes ago. However, IE9 is the only browser that uses download reputation to help users make safety decisions.
This technology helps protect Internet Explorer 8 and Internet Explorer 9 Beta customers by detecting and blocking websites that distribute socially engineered malware and phishing attacks.
If you want to try out Internet Explorer 9, you can download the beta here.
