At the recent RSA 2010 Security Conference in San Francisco, Microsoft Program Manager Eric Lawrence was struck by how many of the speeches warned about the threat that socially-engineered malware poses to the security of the Internet.
Malware, which is short for malicious software, is designed to infiltrate a computer without the owner’s consent. In recent years it has become a real concern as many people often think they are downloading games or free videos when in fact they are downloading Trojans and viruses. Our data shows that one out of every 250 downloads is the result of a user being tricked into downloading malware to their PC.
Microsoft works tirelessly to stop malware and is proud of the protection the SmartScreen® Filter provides to IE8 users from such attacks.
To quote Eric:
“Since we launched IE8 in March 2009, SmartScreen has blocked over 560 million attempts to download malware, recently averaging over 3 million blocks per day! Hosted in datacenters around the world, SmartScreen’s URL Reputation Service (URS) has evaluated over 250 billion URLs to help keep IE8 users safe from malware. Even more impressively, since IE7’s Phishing Filter was introduced in 2005, the URS has processed over 5.7 trillion reputation requests in order to block malicious web sites. Every day, Microsoft receives around 300 million telemetry reports from IE8 users and processes 4.1 billion URLs looking for malicious websites and files. On the back end, our systems and analysts evaluate over 1 terabyte of binaries every day to help identify sites delivering malware.”
Internet Explorer 8 is the latest version of Internet Explorer and has been designed to provide market leading protection against malware. Older browsers will not have the same level of protection. If your family and friends are not using Internet Explorer 8, please encourage them to upgrade for a safer Internet experience.
For more information visit http://blogs.msdn.com/ie/archive/2010/03/05/ie8-smartscreen-filter-protecting-users-at-internet-scale.aspx
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