Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 is more effective at blocking both phishing sites and socially engineered malware than Firefox, Safari and other browsers, say two new reports from NSS Labs. Microsoft is pushing its community to upgrade from Internet Explorer 6 and 7 to the new browser, which it says can offer better security and features, even as users continue to use the older applications. Once the dominant browser, the Internet Explorer franchise has lost ground in recent months to open-source Firefox.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer 8 Web browser is effective at blocking both phishing sites and socially engineered malware, according to two new NSS Labs reports. In turn, this has led Microsoft to push for its users to upgrade to the new browser from IE 6 and IE 7, which a significant portion of the community continues to use. 

During a 14-day test period, NSS Labs, an independent online security-testing organization, found that the mean block rate for phishing for Internet Explorer 8 stood at 83 percent, versus 80 percent for Firefox 3, 54 percent for Opera 10, 26 percent for Chrome 2, and 2 percent for Safari 4. In the final report issued by the group, Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 were in a virtual dead heat when it came to blocking phishing URLs, given that NSS Labs’ margin of error was 3.96 percent.

It should be noted that the NSS Labs testing was sponsored by Microsoft. In comments posted online, NSS Labs president Rick Moy suggested that Microsoft's security engineering team had originally commissioned the study, whose results were then picked up by Redmond's marketing department for use. However, a number of sources online, including Ars Technica and The Tech Herald, feel that Microsoft's sponsorship could have introduced a biased element into the study.

The testing also found that Internet Explorer 8 needed an average of 4.96 hours to add a requested phishing URL to its block list, while Firefox 3 took 5.24 hours and Opera 10 Beta needed 6.19 hours. The mean time for a browser to block a site was 16.43 hours, a number exceeded in testing only by Safari 4, which needed an average of 54.67 hours to put a site on its block list.

Full Story at eweek

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