As we are living in the days of phishing attacks on the web, the major problem lies with the fact that we can never be sure of whether a link that we have selected or about to select is legit or not. Of course there are quizzes that help you in learning to identify phishing pages but nothing had ever been done on a mainstream level until today.
Yes, Google is now ready to offer real time check on potential phishing links that you open on the Chrome browser.
For those of you who are still not very familiar with the invention of phishing attacks, its a hacking method which involves attackers stealing usernames and passwords, all with the help of tricking victims in such a way that they first click the malicious links and then even enter login credentials. Users get fooled because phishing pages turn out to be exact copies of the original ones.
The stats related to phishing attacks are becoming worse as in the period of July to September, Google has approximately sent 12,000 warnings related to state sponsored phishing attacks, which are being targeted towards the users in the United States. In fact as per Verizon's annual cyber security report, phishing has turned out to be the leading cause of data breaches. Moreover, Google also claims to have blocked 100 million phishing emails every day.
However, as we know that phishing links don’t only come in emails; attackers can spread their trap with malicious advertisements or even direct messages on chat apps. So, to tackle the issue in detail, Google has launched an extra level protection which will make your Chrome browser do real time checks on visiting sites.
To bring this much needed change into your own browser, all you have to do is enable “Make searches and browsing better” in "Sync and Google services" Settings.
This subtle change can also be regarded as an incremental update to the same protection option which already existed in Chrome’s Safe Browsing Mode. Previously the URL of every website was checked and made sure that it didn’t match any of the names in Google’s block-list. The only downside was that the list only synced after every 30 minutes, which made it easier for hackers to bypass the filter with new phishing URLs.
With the current phishing protection plans, the checking of visited URL will take place in real-time. However, Google won’t be saving every website you visit in the log or see the full URL as well. Instead the company would only now check the partial fingerprint or an encrypted version of the link. That being said, Google will also only save the encrypted versions of people's usernames and passwords.
To eliminate further doubts, Google even shared the results of the change in a blog post by reporting a 30% increase in finding new malicious websites.
Going beyond the protection against phishing links, Google has also promised to incorporate certain Chrome extensions into the browser as default. One of the most recent examples of such useful tools is Password Checkup that warns users when their login credentials had been stolen in a breach and then encourages them to change in order to save themselves from any kind of attacks by the hackers.
You can enable the feature by going into the “Sync and Google Services” settings.
The features will start to roll out slowly in Chrome's 79 version.
Read next: The Significant Increase In Social Media Impersonation Attacks And How To Protect Yourself From Them
Yes, Google is now ready to offer real time check on potential phishing links that you open on the Chrome browser.
For those of you who are still not very familiar with the invention of phishing attacks, its a hacking method which involves attackers stealing usernames and passwords, all with the help of tricking victims in such a way that they first click the malicious links and then even enter login credentials. Users get fooled because phishing pages turn out to be exact copies of the original ones.
The stats related to phishing attacks are becoming worse as in the period of July to September, Google has approximately sent 12,000 warnings related to state sponsored phishing attacks, which are being targeted towards the users in the United States. In fact as per Verizon's annual cyber security report, phishing has turned out to be the leading cause of data breaches. Moreover, Google also claims to have blocked 100 million phishing emails every day.
However, as we know that phishing links don’t only come in emails; attackers can spread their trap with malicious advertisements or even direct messages on chat apps. So, to tackle the issue in detail, Google has launched an extra level protection which will make your Chrome browser do real time checks on visiting sites.
To bring this much needed change into your own browser, all you have to do is enable “Make searches and browsing better” in "Sync and Google services" Settings.
This subtle change can also be regarded as an incremental update to the same protection option which already existed in Chrome’s Safe Browsing Mode. Previously the URL of every website was checked and made sure that it didn’t match any of the names in Google’s block-list. The only downside was that the list only synced after every 30 minutes, which made it easier for hackers to bypass the filter with new phishing URLs.
With the current phishing protection plans, the checking of visited URL will take place in real-time. However, Google won’t be saving every website you visit in the log or see the full URL as well. Instead the company would only now check the partial fingerprint or an encrypted version of the link. That being said, Google will also only save the encrypted versions of people's usernames and passwords.
To eliminate further doubts, Google even shared the results of the change in a blog post by reporting a 30% increase in finding new malicious websites.
Going beyond the protection against phishing links, Google has also promised to incorporate certain Chrome extensions into the browser as default. One of the most recent examples of such useful tools is Password Checkup that warns users when their login credentials had been stolen in a breach and then encourages them to change in order to save themselves from any kind of attacks by the hackers.
You can enable the feature by going into the “Sync and Google Services” settings.
The features will start to roll out slowly in Chrome's 79 version.
Read next: The Significant Increase In Social Media Impersonation Attacks And How To Protect Yourself From Them
