This Google Chrome feature can protect you from malware and phishing attacks

Online browsing comes with responsibility as users can be tricked into sharing sensitive information and end up becoming victims of phishing attacks. Online fraudsters can steal passwords with misleading or fake websites or install malicious software or malware. To avoid falling into the trap of such nasty activities, Google Chrome comes with a security feature that lets you protect yourself from such threats on the internet. This is called Safe Browsing protection. Chrome uses the Safe Browsing service from Google to identify and ward off various threats while browsing online.

You should be aware that when you navigate to a webpage on the internet, your browser fetches objects hosted on the internet such as images, links, downloads, other webpages embedded in the main webpage, and more. Each of these links can potentially host threats to your device. From phishing websites, malware, unwanted downloads, and malicious software to unfair billing practices. In such cases, Chrome Safe Browsing works as a shield to protect you from threats while checking all links, redirects or included resources.

“Safe Browsing works in different ways depending on the user’s preferences. In the most common case, Chrome uses the privacy-conscious Update API (Application Programming Interface) from the Safe Browsing service. This API was developed with user privacy in mind and ensures Google gets as little information about the user’s browsing history as possible,” Google said in a blog post. Here’s how Safe Browsing helps you stay safe from phishing and malware attacks.

Chrome Safe Browsing keeps you protective from online threats

• This Safe Browsing feature provides you a list for each threat it protects you against on the internet. You can find a full list by visiting chrome://safe-browsing/#tab-db-manager on desktop platforms.
• Google further explains that a list does not contain unsafe web addresses, also referred to as URLs, in entirety. However, it maps a URL, which can be very long, through a cryptographic hash function to a unique fixed size string, which is called a hash.
• The list is updated following the Update API’s request frequency section. These updates happen roughly every 30 minutes.