Google says it is updating the default safe browsing mode in Chrome to offer better protection against malicious websites. Until now, this mode used a locally stored list to check if a site or file may be dangerous. The list is updated every 30 to 60 minutes, but Google says that a malicious website only exists for 10 minutes on average.
To combat that, Google is taking advantage of a feature in Safe Browsing's enhanced protection mode to compare sites to a server-side list of known unsafe sites in real time. Enhanced Protection Mode is optional, but Google found that these real-time checks offer “significant value,” so it's adding them to the standard version of Safe Browsing.
The company notes that Safe Browsing is used on more than 5 billion devices and helps protect against phishing, malware, and unwanted software. The mode evaluates more than 10 billion URLs and files per day. Chrome shows users more than 3 million warnings about potential threats through this feature daily. However, Google believes that real-time URL checks will help it block 25 percent more phishing attempts.
Google says it takes privacy into account, as Safe Browsing does not share the URLs of the sites you visit with the company. Chrome says this feature uses hashing and encryption. A privacy server removes any details that could identify a user before forwarding encrypted hash prefixes to the Safe Browsing server for comparison against the list of incomplete sites.
The company still recommends that users adopt the enhanced protection mode as it offers additional safeguards. The Safe Browsing option only compares a list of sites that are already known to be unsafe. Enhanced protection analyzes additional factors and uses machine learning to identify risky sites that Safe Browsing has not yet confirmed as potentially malicious. Safe Browsing detection systems may not immediately detect newly created sites and those that mask their true behavior.
The new Safe Browsing feature is now available in the latest desktop and iOS versions of Chrome. It's coming to the Android app later this month.
Meanwhile, Google says it recently updated Chrome's password verification feature on iOS. In addition to alerting you about compromised passwords, it will now warn you about weak and reused credentials.
