Google is Adding Real-Time Threat Protection to Chrome

Google announced today that it is improving the Safe Browsing feature in its flagship Chrome web browser to include real-time threat protection. It’s available now on desktop, iPhone, and iPad, and is coming later this month to Android.

“Safe Browsing already protects more than 5 billion devices worldwide, defending against phishing, malware, unwanted software, and more,” Google’s Jonathan Li and Jasika Bawa write in the announcement post. “In fact, Safe Browsing assesses more than 10 billion URLs and files every day, showing more than 3 million user warnings for potential threats.”

To date, Safe Browsing used a local list to check whether a site or file was potentially dangerous, and it updated that list every 30 to 60 minutes. But because the average malicious site has an active lifetime of less than 10 minutes, Google needed to provide a more sophisticated response in real-time.

This explains the change: Safe Browsing now checks sites and files in real-time against a cloud-based list that is updated dynamically, and it uses encryption and other techniques to maintain your privacy. And the warnings this feature displays provide the user with additional information. Google expects to block over 25 percent more phishing attempts as a result of this change, which is impressive when you consider that Safe Browsing given the stats in the quote above.

Google notes that users who want even more protection can enable Safe Browsing’s Enhanced Protection mode, which uses AI to block attacks, perform deep file scans, and provides additional protections against potentially malicious Chrome extensions. (You can learn more here.)

Related to this, Google also revealed that it recently updated Password Checkup in Chrome for iPhone and iPad to display an alert anytime it detects a weak o reused password, something it did previously for compromised passwords only.