The web has been a real learning experience for my family. The kids learn about geodes and where Dora lost her friendship bracelet, while I learn about malware and phishing. Fortunately, Windows Live Family Safety lets me block the sites I know are dangerous for them and allow the ones I know they like and are safe. And if the kids try to do an end-run around mom and check out other sites, I know right away with activity reports.
But even with all this great defensive planning, there are hackers out there working just as hard to find new ways to do their own end-run. Family Safety and Internet Explorer work great together because their always-evolving security features help me guard against these new hacker tactics. Today, the new Internet Explorer 8 is being released with some great new ways to protect against hackers. There’s SmartScreen that helps protect my family from socially-engineered attacks like malware and phishing, and other technologies that help protect my PC from drive-by attacks like cross-site scripting and ClickJacking.
SmartScreen helps me protect my kids from more malware than ever before. Malware is hard enough for adults to identify; kids have an even harder time. A game site is a game site to them. Free stuff is endlessly alluring. How are they supposed to know that the cool screensaver they are downloading isn’t really a cool screensaver, but a covert, potentially harmful piece of software that they are putting on the family computer where your banking information is located, right next to the LEGO blueprints and the sledding pictures?
Internet Explorer 8 works against ClickJacking and cross-site scripting technologies to prevent Junior from clicking on a picture of a Pokémon and being taken to another website without realizing it. When Junior thought he was clicking Pikachu, he may have actually clicked something else: buying something from another site, changing settings on your browser or computer, or being shown inappropriate advertisements. It’s complicated, but Internet Explorer 8 lets website developers protect their sites from these kinds of attacks by preventing their legitimate pages from being “framed.” 
All these new features in Internet Explorer 8 work together to help identify threats for you and your kids, block them, or just warn you so you can avoid a digital disaster. Once Internet Explorer 8 is installed, there’s nothing more to configure, nothing extra for you to buy or download or install, it just works. Downloading and upgrading to Internet Explorer 8 only takes a few minutes!
If all this has made you curious about the new security features in Internet Explorer 8 and the new kinds of malicious software technologies that they guard against, you can also read this white paper for all the details.
Oh, and by the way, I am also posting this on the Windows Live team blog, which has more great info about using Windows Live on the web.
- Sylvia F., Mom and writer, Windows Live Family Safety
