Google is Now Blocking 25% of Phishing Sites

Google has now introduced real-time protection for your Chrome browser. The company has announced many major changes in its safe browsing features for Chrome so that users can browse their favorite sites with more safety and security.

As the technology is evolving day by day, so are the cyber attacks. To protect its users from these attacks, Google has introduced real-time URL protection for all desktop and iOS users. The company is also rolling out this feature for Android users later this month.

“The Standard protection mode for Chrome on desktop and iOS will check sites against Google’s server-side list of known bad sites in real-time. If we suspect a site poses a risk to you or your device, you’ll see a warning with more information. By checking sites in real-time, we expect to block 25% more phishing attempts.”- Jonathan Li, Product Manager, Safe Browsing, Google.

Google safe browsing was introduced in 2005 and after that, it is continuously protecting the users from phishing and malware activities. But as the attackers are becoming advanced, google has now come up with a new version of safe browsing.

Also read – Google Deepmind Announced SIMA

How Chrome detects and warns you about unsafe sites:

In order to provide real-time protection to the users, Google will now perform the check based on the list maintained on the server side. Google has also partnered with Fastly. So that they can operate an (OHTTP) privacy server between Chrome and Safe Browsing.

• When you visit a site, Chrome first checks its cache to see if the address (URL) of the site is already known to be safe (see the “Staying speedy and reliable” section for details).
• If the visited URL is not in the cache, it may be unsafe, so a real-time check is necessary.
• Chrome obfuscates the URL by following the URL hashing guidance to convert the URL into 32-byte full hashes.
• Chrome truncates the full hashes into 4-byte long hash prefixes.
• Chrome encrypts the hash prefixes and sends them to a privacy server (see the “Keeping your data private” section for details).
• The privacy server removes potential user identifiers and forwards the encrypted hash prefixes to the Safe Browsing server via a TLS connection that mixes requests with many other Chrome users.
• The Safe Browsing server decrypts the hash prefixes and matches them against the server-side database, returning full hashes of all unsafe URLs that match one of the hash prefixes sent by Chrome.
• After receiving the unsafe full hashes, Chrome checks them against the full hashes of the visited URL.
• If any match is found, Chrome will show a warning.

However, chrome users should also turn on the Enhanced protection with the safe browsing mode. It will offer the users extra protection while they are browsing their favorite sites.