IE8 whips rivals in blocking malware sites

Computerworld - Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer 8 again trounced rival browsers in a test of their malware-blocking abilities, catching 81% of attack-code-infected sites, according to a testing company.

IE8's skills at sniffing out malware sites improved by 17% since March, said Rick Moy, president of NSS Labs, the firm that conducted the benchmarks. The testing was sponsored by Microsoft's security team.

IE8's improvement, and its dominance over competitors, could make some users reconsider decisions to abandon Microsoft's browser for one of its challengers. "Should people rethink that decision?" Moy asked. "By [this] data, absolutely."

While IE8 blocked eight of 10 of the malware-distributing sites that NSS included in its 12-day test, the nearest competitor, Mozilla's Firefox 3.0, caught just 27% of the same sites. Apple's Safari 4.0 and Google's Chrome 2.0, meanwhile, blocked only 21% and 7% of the sites, respectively. Opera Software's browser properly identified only 1%.

"I think it comes down to resources and the focus of these companies," Moy said in an interview, referring to Microsoft's ability to outspend rivals on such things as security research and malicious site investigations. "The more researchers you have, the better you'll do. Microsoft has a certain amount of paranoia [about security] because of its footprint of services that get attacked all the time, like Hotmail, and it has the money to hire really smart people."

Opera, which performed the poorest in the malware-blocking benchmarks, is an example on the other end of the spectrum, said Moy. "What resources do they really have to bring to the problem?" he asked. "There's a lot that can't be solved with software, but requires the human element."

NSS tested five Windows-based browsers -- IE8, Firefox 3.0.11, Safari 4.0.2, Chrome 2.0.0.172.33 and Opera 10 beta -- against more than 2,100 malware sites in 69 test runs over 12 days. Like the tests NSS Labs ran last March, the sites were so-called "socially engineered" malware sites, the type that trick users into downloading attack code. Typically, the download is disguised, often as an update to popular software such as Adobe's Flash Player.

The tests did not include sites that launch "drive-by" attacks that don't require user interaction, an increasingly common tactic by hackers who often infect legitimate sites with kits that try a number of different exploits in the hope of compromising an unpatched browser or PC.

To defend against the kind of sites that NSS tested, browser makers have added anti-malware features to their software. Microsoft, for instance, has aggressively touted its SmartScreen Filter, a new malware-detection feature in IE8.

All browsers that include such a tool -- or anti-phishing tools, which operate in a similar fashion -- rely on a blacklist of some sort. Those lists include known or suspected malware sites, and they enable the browsers to warn users when they type in the URL of one of the sites on the list.