Microsoft continues to beat the drum of Internet Explorer 8’s superiority in terms of security compared to rival browser. The Redmond company has used the Black Friday and Cyber Monday days, and the boost in online shopping associated with the two post-Thanksgiving dates, to stress the importance of running a secure browser for end users that do their shopping online. According to statistics made available by the software giant, IE8 managed to block in excess of 275 million pieces of malware since the browser was introduced.

“To date, Internet Explorer 8 has delivered over 275 Million malware blocks. And as of September, Internet Explorer 8 is blocking 1 in every 200 downloads that appear as malicious. Internet Explorer 8 also helps protect your privacy with InPrivate Browsing,” explained Brandon LeBlanc, Windows Communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team.

Internet Explorer 8 comes with the SmartScreen, a security feature designed to keep end users safe from online attacks, and especially to protect them against phishing attempts. Phishing is a term describing an attack based on a social engineering schemes in which victims are tricked into revealing sensitive information, including credit card data, to malicious websites masquerading as legitimate sites. However, at the same time, IE8 is designed to protect against additional types of online-based attacks.

“There are 3 major threats people shopping online should be aware of: Malware, Cross-site Scripting (XSS), and ClickJacking. Internet Explorer 8 protects against each of these threats (via SmartScreen), making it rated #1 for malicious software and phishing protection,” LeBlanc added.

At the end of November 2009, Microsoft noted that IE8’s SmartScreen was blocking on average approximately two million malicious websites on a daily basis. In combination with Windows Vista or Windows 7 with User Account Control turned on, Internet Explorer 8 can also prevent attacks from the Internet from writing anything locally to disk, as it is running with standard user privileges.

Internet Explorer 8 is available for download here.