14 DAY TRIAL // While there isn’t a panacea that can “cure” all security and privacy issues, education plays a critical role when it comes down to preventing customers from transforming themselves into victims. And while vulnerabilities can be patched and malware removed from a computer, phishing attacks and social engineering tricks are more difficult to block. A new initiative from Microsoft designed to promote Internet Explorer 8 is also set up to inform customers of the dangers they are facing on a daily basis, especially in scenarios associated with sharing their sensitive data online. And, in the end, it’s education in combination with the right tools, such as IE8, that can keep users secure and protect their data.
“We wanted to raise awareness of just how easy it is to fall victim to these risks and to highlight some of the ways that Internet Explorer 8 can help to protect you. That’s what our new advertising campaign, which kicked off tonight during Fox’s Lie to Me (8/7 Central) and Good Guys (9/8 Central), is all about. We thought the most powerful way to do this would be to tell the story through your eyes, our customer. There are countless real people around the world confronted with online scams every day,” Brandon LeBlanc, Windows communications manager on the Windows Client Communications Team, revealed.
Just watch the video embedded at the bottom of the screen in order to get an idea of what Microsoft has been up to. Essentially, the Redmond company has staged a real-world phishing attack. The software giant has set up a fake bank in New York, and attracted unsuspecting victims with the promise that they would get $500 for opening a new account. The catch was that they needed to first share all of their personal information.
“To prove just how vulnerable your personal information is, Internet Explorer 8 re-recreated notorious internet scams--live, off the web-- in the most street-smart city in world: New York. We used hidden cameras to film reactions of real people. In the first spot we asked people to provide very personal information in order to open a new bank account which would give them a cash reward of $500. We learned that, just as it is online, it can be hard to tell the difference between the scammer and the real thing. We filmed a lot of people and nearly all of them were convinced our ‘bank’ was the real deal,” LeBlanc added.
While Microsoft only orchestrated a fraud, countless attacks such as the one in the company’s examples are happening online on a daily basis. And users simply hand over their data without thinking twice, just because they were promised various incentives, ending up losing money, their identities, etc. But while, in the real world, there are no tools to tell users that they are being scammed, not the same is valid when online. Internet Explorer 8 contains multiple security and privacy features designed to protect users.
LeBlanc enumerated a few:
“- Internet Explorer 8 SmartScreen Filter automatically blocks web pages which look suspicious or have been reported as suspicious and warns you of the risks. Every day the SmartScreen Filter blocks 3 million suspicious pages.
“- Domain Highlighting also reduces risks by clearly identifying the real location of the page you are viewing and helping you check that it really is the page you were expecting and not just one that looks like the real thing.
“- Internet Explorer 8 also helps protect your privacy with InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Filtering. InPrivate Filtering in Internet Explorer 8 helps protect your privacy by preventing information about the Web sites that you visit from automatically being shared with other sites.”