"Microsoft unveiled two security features that will debut in the next version of its browser, Internet Explorer 8: the Safety Filter, which warns users of potentially malicious Web activity, and domain highlighting, which uses bold text to highlight the real domain of any Web site.

The software giant stressed that the features were part of its focus on improving security for Web surfers.

"With the Safety Filter, Microsoft will now protect against a broader set of online threats by analyzing the full URL string, providing more granular detection and prevention capabilities enables us to protect against more targeted and sophisticated attacks," Microsoft said in a statement sent to SecurityFocus.

Mozilla, the company behind the open-source browser Firefox, announced previously that the next version of it browser, Firefox 3, will include a host of security features, among them protection against malicious downloads from Web sites. Dubbed malware protection, the feature will use a hash of the Web site's address, or URL, to compare against a list of sites known to host malicious downloads.

"Malware protection (like anti-phishing protection) looks for sites that it has identified as hosting malware," said Window Snyder, chief security officer for Mozilla. "The underlying structure is similar, but how we know about the sites is different."

Article Link: http://www.securityfocus.com/news/11508