SmartScreen Filter helps protect Internet Explorer 8 (download) users against phishing scams and sites distributing malware. Malware authors are always trying to come up with new ways to infect your computer, an interesting example of such a trick, as reported by the SANS Internet Storm Center. Fake parking tickets placed on cars around a city directed users to a website where they would need to install a toolbar to view pictures of their violation; the toolbar turned out to be malware. The database used by the SmartScreen Filter was immediately updated, and any user who tried to download this malware toolbar would have had it blocked, if they were running IE8 with the SmartScreen Filter enabled.

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