If the good guy gets the girl, it's rated PG; if the bad guy gets the girl, it's rated R; and if everybody gets the girl, it's rated X - Kirk Douglas
|
|
|
Internet Explorer is best at blocking socially engineered malware attacks
INDEPENDENT TESTING FIRM NSS Labs has published results that show Internet Explorer is six times better at blocking web based socially engineered malware attacks than the competition.
All major browsers incorporate some form of malicious URL filtering technology, either proprietary or open source. The NSS Labs test was designed to verify how efficient they are at blocking links to pages that distribute malware via social engineering.
The company defines a socially engineered malware threat as "a web page link that directly leads to a download that delivers a malicious payload whose content type would lead to execution, or more generally a website known to host malware links".
This means that web pages that automatically install malware by exploiting vulnerabilities in the browsers themselves or their plug-ins were not considered in this test, despite being an important distribution vector.
The malicious URLs used in the test (PDF) were extracted from spam messages that spread via email, instant messaging, social networks and other web sites, but the report focused primarily on campaigns that targeted European users.
The tested products were Internet Explorer 9, Internet Explorer 8, Safari 5, Chrome 10, Firefox 4 and Opera 11. All of them were fed the same malicious URLs every day for a week to see how their detection rates changed over time.
Internet Explorer, which has an URL blocking feature called the Smartscreen Filter, registered the best results by far. For example, IE8 started with a 38 per cent block rate at time zero, doubled by the next day, and had an 90 per cent mean rate at the end.
Share this:
Share
This is based on the eurostat data? Uhm.. ok.
Are they a good source for statistics that are not too clear cut?
Let's see what it says about eurostat's trackrecord:
"2010 Following strong critics from within and outside the EU on how it did handle falsified Greek data, Eurostat published a report to try to justify
Maybe I'm too cynical.
P.S. the captcha to post this starts with IE and ends with MS
At the risk of becoming unpopular I have to say that this humble dogsbody's experience of 'alternative' browsers has been disappointing of late.
Chrome is less useful than the google toolbar in another browser. Really quite a sad spartan let down.
Firefox has been unreliable in Win7x64 and pages regularly fail to display correctly in all OS meaning one has to have exploder on standby anyway.
The fact is it was only residual MS aversion justified by malware risk management that kept me using these other browsers because they are intrinsically less helpful.
I can only assume there is some kind of complacency at work in the developers which keeps them that way. Fanboy denials dont help here. Facing the truth is much better for everyone.
So they use IE 8 and 9, skip 7, that probably 50% of its market share comes from; and then metric it against a two release old version 10 of chrome.
This is a terrible metric of a specific attack vector tailored to the previous gaping vulnerability holes of IE 7. Hillarious.
you guys maybe want to read the webpage and actually understand what was being said.
The whole site is quite intresting and some of the reports that are on there are actually quite critical of MS in other aspects.
I think this comes down to, anything MS is crap BS, perhaps for once consider that whilst they are far from perfect they have done some good stuff over time, just as Linux and and Apple have done as well.
Some folk are so blinded by their hate for MS or Apple or the linux/ open source community that they fail to see the bigger picture.
with "38 per cent block rate at time zero".
And since nearly all malware is targeted at IE, it's still the biggest security problem out here.
This is just M$'s paid hacks trying to spin the awful so it looks good.
but if you report obvious phish to IE smart filter it takes well over 1-2 days to block. Totally useless.
Try it - you will be disappointed
Sorry, since Microsoft has a *long* history of buying this sort of "research", I'm sceptical of the results.