Today, Google has announced a new Enhanced Safe Browsing feature that will offer real-time protection against known malicious web sites and downloads.
Since 2007, Google has offered the Safe Browsing feature to protect users from malicious web sites and files that contain malware, display phishing pages, or attempt to install malicious files.
Since its release, numerous browsers, including Google Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, utilize this security feature to protect their users from online threats.
How Safe Browsing works
Google Chrome uses Safe Browsing by downloading lists of known malicious sites and saving them locally. When a user visits a web site or downloads a file, Chrome will check the URL against the locally stored Safe Browsing databases and block it if it is known to be malicious.
When visiting URLs that are contained in the local lists, the browser will send a hashed partial URL fingerprints back to Google to confirm if it is malicious.
If it is, Google will display a warning interstitial, as shown below.
The problem with Safe Browsing is that new malicious websites and downloads are created all the time, and outdated locally stored Safe Browsing lists may miss new threats.
"Safe Browsing’s blocklist API is an existing security protocol that protects billions of devices worldwide. Every day, Safe Browsing discovers thousands of new unsafe sites and adds them to the blocklist API that is shared with the web industry. Chrome checks the URL of each site you visit or file you download against a local list, which is updated approximately every 30 minutes. Increasingly, some sophisticated phishing sites slip through that 30-minute refresh window by switching domains very quickly," Google explained in the announcement.
Enhanced Safe Browsing Protection was developed to fix these shortcomings and strengthen protections.
Enhanced Safe Browsing brings real-time protection
With today's release of the Enhanced Safe Browsing protection feature, Chrome users will now be able to get real-time protection when browsing the web and downloading files.
With this feature, when you browse a site or download a file, Chrome will share additional information with Google Safe Browsing so it can check URLs for malicious activity.
The use of this feature, though, does come with a small sacrifice in privacy as "Chrome will also send a small sample of pages and suspicious downloads to help discover new threats against you and other Chrome users."
Furthermore, states that if you are signed into Chrome and are using Enhanced Safe Browsing, the transferred data is linked temporarily to your Google account to detect if an attack if targeting your browser or account.
"If you are signed in to Chrome, this data is temporarily linked to your Google Account. We do this so that when an attack is detected against your browser or account, Safe Browsing can tailor its protections to your situation. In this way, we can provide the most precise protection without unnecessary warnings. After a short period, Safe Browsing anonymizes this data so it is no longer connected to your account," Google stated.
If you are willing to sacrifice some of your browsing data for a short period for better protection, then Enhanced Safe Browsing is an option that you should enable.
With today's release of Chrome 83, users can enable Enhanced Safe Browsing protection by going to chrome://settings/security and selecting it.
This feature is brand new and currently rolling out to Chrome 83 users.
If you are unable to access the chrome://settings/security page, please be patient while the feature is rolled out to everyone.
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