Every year, many people across the world become a victim of online fraud and forgery when they access a phishing page or virus infected website. Such people click on spam links in search results or emails. The page requests the user to enter bank details as a result of which, money is withdrawn from the bank account without the consent of the account owner. There are many such examples in which an internet user is fooled and he suffers from monetary losses.
Google, the most powerful search engine makes visitors of harmful links in the search pages itself. If the user finds bad links in some other search engine or social network, Google can’t help but its Chrome browser can.
The browser which has over 100 million active installs will now protect the users with its new safe browsing feature (you can enable it from privacy settings). Chrome will now automatically block users access to links that it considers malicious and deceptive. It will display a full page warning for the same.
Google claims that this new security feature is inbuilt in the play services (version 8.1 and higher). If you’re using a lower version, make sure that you update it as soon as possible. According to Google, the play store is carefully monitored to find and remove malicious applications. Thus, the user will never encounter a malicious app in the official Android marketplace.
The security features in mobile applications require additional system resources for processing the website requests and response. The Chrome browser for Android will not overwhelm the processor nor it will flood the RAM with a lot of data.
Users of other desktop-based web-browsers should install a premium internet security software. The standalone security application will process links in real-time and it will block users from accessing them. On a mobile device, the Chrome browser with the safe browsing module is the best available option for the same.
Source: Google Security Blog
