Internet Explorer 9 Defends Best Against Malware Links

Jack

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Microsoft Internet Explorer 9 offers Web surfers the best protection against social engineering malware, according to test results released today by an independent research firm.

With its new Application Reputation feature, IE9 blocks malicious URLs more than 99 percent of the time, according to NSS Labs, of Carlsbad, Ca.

Application Reputation is Microsoft's attempt to create a definitive list of every application on the Internet. The list is dynamically created and maintained, much the same way Google and Bing are continuously building and maintaining a library of content for search purposes. That list is then used to establish the reputation of a program.

"It became obvious from these recent tests, in comparison to NSS Labs’ earlier global tests, that Microsoft continues to improve their IE malware protection in IE9 through its SmartScreen Filter technology and with the addition of SmartScreen Application Reputation technology," NSS reported.

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Read report for full test results [PDF]
 

jamescv7

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Mar 15, 2011
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Great job for IE since they are long time primarily focused in detecting bad websites and viruses through smartscreen filter and their newly application reputation.
 

Hungry Man

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Jul 21, 2011
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When testing malware I have to download a third party browser because IE9 blocks too often.
 

jamescv7

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This proved that IE can defend even the zero day malware. Greatly significant improved so far IE9 is the most better version in all IE version.
 

win7holic

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Apr 20, 2011
2,079
if microsoft release great AV. then, other vendors will not get chance to get more users, since MSE is free and great ;)
 

Jack

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IE9's results might not be very meaningful because its Smartscreen Application Reputation technology has a good amount of false positives.
This reputation based filter is supposed to determine if a file is suspicious or not by looking at how many times it has been downloaded by IE 9 users and whether it is digitally signed or not. A lot of executables are triggering the Smartscreen warning dialog at the moment, regardless of whether they are actually malicious or not.
Microsoft said that in the long run, the SmartScreen's reputation systems will become more accurate which makes sense because the Reputation is linked to the user submissions...
The test took into account only the socially engineered malware , however there are other threats that users have to face like, Drive-by downloads or exploits which are just as big a threat as socially engineered malware and Google Chrome probably offers the best protection when it comes to such attacks. Also the report didn't take into consideration non-malware web threats such as spam or phishing either.
Nevertheless the SmartScreen Filter in IE 9 is a powerful layer of protection which should be seen in other browser as well, congratulations to Microsoft for the great results and this great feature.
 

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