Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) delivered more than 70 million blocks of malware in the past four months, highlighting just how widespread socially engineered malware attacks are today, according to new findings.

Writing on the IE blog yesterday, Microsoft IE program manager Eric Lawrence said that combined with the efforts of the pre-release version, the cumulative total for IE's SmartScreen Filter is now 80 million malware blocks.

He added that IE8 is delivering a malware block for approximately one out of 40 users every week, with approximately one of every 200 downloads being blocked as malicious.

Internet Explorer 7 and IE8 also contain a Phishing Filter, which has allowed Microsoft to gain insight into the prevalence of this kind of attack on its users.

Together, the two browsers have blocked more than 125 million phishing attacks, said Lawrence, with IE8 displaying a mean block rate of 83 per cent, according to a study carried out by NSS Labs.

The latest report from security-as-a-service vendor ScanSafe said it blocked 36 per cent more malware in the second quarter of 2009 than in the previous quarter, which equates to an average of 4,575 malware encounters per customer.

The Gumblar botnet was the single biggest contributor, with 14 per cent of all web malware encounters in the quarter the result of encounters with Gumblar-compromised web sites.