Rita El Khoury / Android Authority
TL;DR
- Google has provided valuable insights about Chrome’s Enhanced Protection mode.
- The mode utilizes advanced AI and machine learning models to differentiate between trusted websites and potential scams.
- It also prevents malicious downloads by regularly scanning suspicious files against advanced scanners.
It’s been almost five years since Google introduced Enhanced Safe Browsing Protection in Chrome to give users a more advanced level of security while browsing the web. In that time, the Enhanced protection mode has amassed over a billion users worldwide. If you’ve ever wondered how exactly the mode keeps users safe from phishing attempts and other scams, Google has shared some insights today in honor of Safer Internet Day.
In a recent blog post, the company revealed that Chrome’s Enhanced Protection utilizes advanced AI and machine learning models to spot known phishing, social engineering, and scam techniques. These models are trained to identify scam URLs that look like trusted domains and compare suspicious pages to known attack patterns.
Additionally, Enhanced Protection can protect users from malicious downloads by running “more than 300,000 deep scams of suspicious files against advanced scanners every month” to find previously unseen forms of malware. It can even protect users from threats hidden within encrypted archives.
Enhanced Protection also anonymizes data, including URLs, page contents, files, etc., to protect user privacy whenever possible. Google maintains that this user data is only “used for security purposes, and retained only as long as necessary.”
If you find yourself on shady websites more often than you’d like and want to stay safe from scams and phishing attempts, you should enable Chrome’s Enhanced Safe Browsing protection mode right away. To do so, navigate to the Privacy and Security section in Chrome settings, select Safe Browsing, and enable the Enhanced protection option.
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