Study lauds IE for blocking Web's social attacks

Interesting article. I have been using Chrome and Opera quite a bit lately because my IE8 kept crashing and closing everything out - usually once or twice a day. I also use Firefox but it seems to have problems when I purchase items and doesn't display all the necessary items on check out pages. Usually I have to get the page to rerender as IE so I can see all the items and complete the checkout process.

I may need to look at correcting my IE8 problems instead of avoiding the issue and using other browsers.

 

Nah. IE crashing is how it's protecting you from fraud. That's why it crashes so often - the fraud is just that prolific.

<disclaimer: is a fairly dedicated opera/safari user>

But I honesty am curious about their methodology. Most of the people I know who use something OTHER than Internet Explorer can spot the social engineering and avoid it on a user level, instead of expecting their browser to take care of it. If they were using the same pool of users, and letting them do the same thing on Firefox or Opera or Safari, it's possible that the level of knowledge about social engineering may have been lower, and thus the subjects more prone to it when their browser doesn't block it for them.

tl;dr - People who use other browsers seem to be smater about social engineering. If typical IE users was put on Firefox without social engineering training, that would also point as an explanation for the results.