Microsoft Builds JavaScript Malware Detection Tool

Trailrunner7 writes "As browser-based exploits and specifically JavaScript malware have shouldered their way to the top of the list of threats, browser vendors have been scrambling to find effective defenses to protect users. Few have been forthcoming, but Microsoft Research has developed a new tool called Zozzle that can be deployed in the browser and can detect JavaScript-based malware on the fly at a very high effectiveness rate. Zozzle is designed to perform static analysis of JavaScript code on a given site and quickly determine whether the code is malicious and includes an exploit. In order to be effective, the tool must be trained to recognize the elements that are common to malicious JavaScript, and the researchers behind it stress that it works best on de-obfuscated code."

Comments

Chrome, IE, and FF/NoScript/Adbock/Ghostery

[billstewart]

I've been starting to use Chrome for most new work in addition to Firefox. It doesn't do everything, but it doesn't crash or hang as much as FF, and it reloads much much faster than Firefox if I need to kill it or if I need to reboot my laptop. I still keep IE around for sites that need it (and $WORK finally approved IE7 :-).

Firefox still has trouble - even running NoScript and ad blocker and Ghostery, it'll still hang up every couple of days and start burning the entire CPU core, whether that's from Javascript or Flash or just bugs, and sometimes it crashes, especially on AJAX pages, and sometimes it's unresponsive enough that I need to kill it even if it doesn't crash. It's become tolerable now that I've got a dual-core CPU and more than 1.5GB RAM, but it's annoying.

The application that doesn't work well on Chrome is reading news - take a news aggregator site like FARK, open a hundred news articles in tabs, and then start reading them; Chrome often gets stuck and can't handle it.