ID: IRCNE2013051850
Date: 2013-05-20
According to "techworld", Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 10 is better at blocking malware downloads than rivals Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera thanks to superior URL and application reputation technology, a new test by NSS Labs has found.
After testing the latest version of each of the five browsers against 754 malware-infected URLs over 28 days, IE10 (running on Windows 8) achieved a raw block rate of 99.9 percent, ahead of Chrome’s 83.1 percent, Firefox’s 10 percent, Safari’s 9.9 percent and Opera’s 1.8 percent.
According to NSS, the explanation is that Firefox and Safari both use Google’s older Safe Browsing API v1, a part-cloud URL reputation system, while Opera bought in a similar scheme from a third party. Neither of these options appears to work well any longer.
Interestingly, as of late last year Chrome itself uses the more advanced Safe Browsing API v2 that offers superior protection thanks to a second layer that expands the checks performed on both files as well as URLs.
IE, by contrast, offers the same mix of URL and file reputation filtering as Chrome using SmartScreen but puts itself at the top of the blocking heap by adding a further layer, Application Reputation (sometimes called SmartScreen Application Reputation), basically a cloud scoring system for assessing each application to see whether it or its publisher is known good, known bad, or unknown.
Microsoft and Google's technologies aren't that different to one another in principle but Microsoft's appears to have found more sophisticated file-oriented analytics for spotting realworld threats.
NSS Labs tested IE10's performance on Windows 8; the same App Rec system was also available to Windows 7 users running IE9 but it was unclear whether this would show the same protection, the firm warned.
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