Google Safe Browsing, New Feature

Google Safe Browsing offers a service to just about everyone on the internet. They offer a blacklist that will help to keep you from stumbling onto malware unaware. Most of us have seen this screen pop up a time or two. Whenever there are rubes to phish, crackers will continue producing new sites to grab whatever information people are willing to provide. Google is working on a new feature that checks downloaded files against this same blacklist. It should offer slightly more protection for those users who need it.

This service automatically checks websites you browse against Google's blacklist. It's integrated into Chrome, Firefox, and Safari. What this feature aims to do is add another layer of defense against malware installations. Google keeps a database of known malware URLs. Every time you click a link, Google checks it out and lets you know if everything's okay. If it's bad, you'll see something like this.

If you use one of these browsers, every page you browse to is checked against Google's database, and if it finds a match it'll throw you an error. If you want to turn this service off or on, here's the way to do it in Chrome or Firefox.

Chrome – browse to chrome://settings/browser

Firefox – Edit > Preferences

[via Chromium Blog]