Unsure of a link, and worried it could be a scam? Chrome could have a way to make sure every website you visit is the real deal. Kinda sorta.
Anyone can create a website, and scammers keen on tricking with phishing attempts tend to get away with fake versions of the websites you know all too easily. It’s a problem that can be solved if you look at the URL bar, but click on a link and you might skip that one trick, making it possible that you’ll fall into a scammer’s trap.
Web browsers can do a bit of preliminary security to help warn you, but it’s not always enough, and might see you lose out to a scammer without you realising it.
So Google is making a change to help remedy this, adding a feature to Chrome on desktop, Android, and iOS, with the Chrome version on Windows, Mac, iPhone, and iPad getting support this week to check websites against a known list of bad and dangerous websites in real time.
This feature existed as part of Google Safe Browsing before, but checked the list much less frequently, with the new list check in real time.
Simply put, if someone using Chrome on a phone, tablet, laptop, or desktop encounters a dodgy website, Chrome will alert them with warning information.
Google notes that Safe Browsing assesses more than ten billion websites and files every day, with more than three million warnings for potential threats daily, and this new approach of using a real-time threat checker expects to block more phishing attempts.
It’s rolling out to Chrome on Windows, Mac, iPhone, and iPad this week, with Android users getting the feature on their version of Chrome later in the month.
