Internet Explorer 8’s Smartscreen Filter has passed a new milestone, passing the one billionth stopped malware download.

“Socially engineering attacks like malware are a growing threat on the internet and are one of the most common risks to people’s safety online” wrote Microsoft’s James Pratt.

“We have got better and better at blocking malware through the SmartScreen Filter because we have continued to invest in our back end service since we released IE8 in March 2009” said Pratt.

In the last two months, more than 100 million malware attempts have been blocked by Internet Explorer 8, 5 times as many as the same time last year, with more than 1.7 times the users.

The continued investment and development of malware protection is great for consumers, and helps keep their home PC’s safe.

Malware, also known as phishing (pronounced fishing), protection can also be found in other popular browsers such as Firefox, Chrome, and Opera.

Google, as promised, has turned off the anti-phishing tool used in Firefox 2 as of 20th January. The anti-phishing tool would block sites suspected of hosting identity theft scams.

Recent Firefox build 2.0.0.19 and 2.0.0.20 have had this feature removed, but there are still thousands out there using earlier versions.

Mozilla is urging Firefox 2 users to upgrade to Firefox 3 as soon as possible. Firefox 3 includes a newer version of the anti-phishing protocol provided by Google.

Firefox 2 users can upgrade to Firefox 3 by selecting ‘Check for updates’ in the help menu, or can download the update manually from the Firefox website.