A malware security report by NSS Labs found Windows Internet
Explorer 9 beta caught an "exceptional" 99 percent of the live
threats, leading the non-IE pack by 80 percent. Mozilla Firefox 3.6
caught 19 percent of the live threats, down 10 percent from the NSS
Labs test conducted in the first quarter of 2010. IE9’s protection
includes SmartScreen URL filtering, which is included in IE8 as well as
SmartScreen application reputation, which is new to IE9.
The report noted Apple’s Safari 5 browser caught 11 percent of the live
threats, with overall protection declining 18 percent from Q1 2010.
Google Chrome 6 caught just three percent of the live threats, down 14
percent from the Q1 2010 test and Opera 10 brought up the rear — the
browser caught zero percent of the live threats. The report concluded
the browser provides virtually no protection against socially
engineered malware.
From an initial list of 8,000 new suspicious sites, 1,209 potentially
malicious URLs were prescreened for inclusion in the test and were
available at the time of entry into the test. These were successfully
accessed by the browsers in at least one run. On average, 124 new URLs
were added to the test set per day. NSS Labs then assessed the
browsers’ ability to block malicious URLs as quickly as they found them
on the Internet, and continued testing them every six hours to
determine how long it took a vendor to add protection.
For more, read the eWeek article: Internet Explorer Leads on Malware Security: Report.
