Microsoft proudly has announced that the SmartScreen Filter found in Internet Explorer 8, which helps prevent malware attacks has successfully blocked it’s one billionth malware download attempt.
The SmartScreen filter, similar to those found in other browsers such as Mozilla Firefox works buy cross-checking websites against a white list of known good sites to protect the user and then accessing any new sites a user visits for suspicious behaviour. If a user insists on visiting a known suspicious site, IE8 will block any download attempts by the website from harming the users PC.
“Socially engineering attacks like malware are a growing threat on the internet and are one of the most common risks to people’s safety online. We introduced malware protection in Internet Explorer 8 as part of the SmartScreen Filter and have talked about it on the Windows Experience Blog a couple of times over the last year”, said James Pratt on the Microsoft Blog.
“1 billion malware blocks is an amazing milestone and an example of two things. First socially engineered attacks like malware continue to be a real threat for users on the web. Second, to help keep you safe online your browser needs to continually enhance and improve its service. We have got better and better at blocking malware through the SmartScreen Filter because we have continued to invest in our back end service since we released IE8 in March 2009. It’s this investment that has kept us at the top of the socially engineering malware charts according to NSS Labs and has helped our customers stay safe online.”
For further reading, see the official Microsoft blog post.