If you use Google Chrome, you can enable a new security feature that will warn you if you navigate to a suspicious website that looks like others already known for malicious behavior. Alerts are part of Chrome’s Safe Browsing Enhanced Protection mode, which checks your activity against potentially dangerous sites and warns you if you might encounter malware, phishing, intrusive ads, or social engineering attacks.
How Chrome protects against malicious websites
Most Internet users are familiar with the full-page alerts that appear if you navigate to a site known to be malicious. These red “dangerous site” warnings indicate a high risk of harm to the user and can’t really be ignored as they take up the entire screen and urge you to get to safety.
New “suspicious site” alerts indicate possible risk of harm based on patterns consistent with other known malicious sites. This means that Google isn’t as convinced that the website is actually dangerous, but it looks a lot like others that spread malware or run phishing scams. These suspicious site warnings are smaller pop-ups with the text “This site doesn’t look right” and two button options: Mark as safe Or Return to safety. The different colors, texts and formats make it easy for users to distinguish what Google considers dangerous and suspicious.
You can enable enhanced protection in your Chrome settings
Safe Browsing in Chrome offers three options: standard protection, enhanced protection, and no protection at all (which is not recommended). Standard protection checks your browsing activity, extensions and downloads against Google’s list of dangerous sites, which is updated periodically. In contrast, enhanced protection works in real time and uses AI analysis. Note that enhanced protection requires you to share more information about your activity with Google and for the data to be linked to your Google account.
What do you think of it so far?
Although privacy-conscious users may be hesitant to send more information to Google, stronger protection is likely useful for those who are not as savvy with advanced scam tactics (and therefore more likely to enter credentials or financial information on or download a file from a malicious website). To enable enhanced protection and receive warnings of suspicious websites, go to Settings > Privacy & Security in Chrome and switch Improved protection under the Secure browsing section.
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