Google Chrome Safe Browsing adds real-time protection against malicious sites

Google says it is upgrade Chrome’s standard Safe Browsing mode to offer better protection against malicious websites. Until now, this mode used a locally stored list to check if a site or file might be dangerous. The list is updated every 30-60 minutes, but Google says that a malicious website only exists for 10 minutes on average.

To combat this, Google draws on a feature in Safe Browsing’s enhanced protection mode to check sites against the server’s list of known dangerous sites in real time. Enhanced Protection Mode is included, but Google found that these real-time checks offer “significant value,” so it’s rolling them over to the standard version of Safe Browsing.

The company notes that Safe Browsing is used on more than 5 billion devices and helps protect against phishing, malware and unwanted software. The mode estimates north of 10 billion URLs and files per day. Chrome shows users more than 3 million warnings about potential threats through this feature daily. However, Google believes that real-time URL checks will help it block 25 percent more phishing attempts.

Google says it has privacy in mind because Safe Browsing doesn’t share with the company the URLs of the sites you visit. Chrome says this feature uses hashing and encryption. The Privacy Server removes any details that could identify a user before forwarding encrypted hash prefixes to the Safe Browsing Server to check against the sketchy site list.

The company still recommends users to adopt the enhanced protection mode as it offers additional safeguards. The Safe Browsing option only checks against a list of sites that are already known to be unsafe. Enhanced protection looks at additional factors and uses machine learning to identify risky sites that Safe Browsing has not yet confirmed as potentially malicious. Freshly created sites and those that mask their true behavior may not be immediately detected by Safe Browsing’s detection systems.

The new Safe Browsing feature is now available in the latest versions of Chrome for desktop and iOS. Coming to the Android app later this month.

Meanwhile, Google says it recently updated Chrome’s password check feature on iOS. In addition to warning you about compromised passwords, it will now warn you about weak and reused credentials.