After previously announcing an increased protection from social engineering attacks – deceptive tactics that try to trick you into doing something dangerous, Google has now announced, that the Safe browsing Feature on Chrome will warn you of those fake “Download Now/Play Now” buttons on webpages as well.
This new feature, which will be an extension to the November-announced social engineering attacks update, embedded content (like ads) on a web page will now also be considered social engineering when they either:
- Pretend to act, or look and feel, like a trusted entity — like your own device or browser, or the website itself.
- Try to trick you into doing something you’d only do for a trusted entity — like sharing a password or calling tech support.
This image claims that your software is out-of-date to trick you into clicking “update”.
This image mimics a dialogue from the FLV software developer — but it does not actually originate from this developer.
These buttons seem like they will produce content that relate to the site (like a TV show or sports video stream) by mimicking the site’s look and feel. They are often not distinguishable from the rest of the page.
Safe Browsing has been a sort of hallmark feature on Chrome, safeguarding users from many potentially dangerous malware injections since 2006, and from unwanted software since last to last year.
Google introduced a major update last year, when it had announced through a blog post that in the coming weeks, UwS detection will be improving drastically on Chrome. Later that year, Google made Safe Browsing, a default for Chrome on Android devices.
