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In a blog post this week, Google announced plans to add a new layer of security to its Chrome browser by having it warn surfers of potentially malicious downloads. This is in addition to Chrome's "Safe Browsing" technology, which Google says "has done a lot of good for the Web," though admits that "the Internet remains rife with deceptive and harmful content." This is where malicious download warnings will come in.
"It’s easy to find sites hosting free downloads that promise one thing but actually behave quite differently. These downloads may even perform actions without the user’s consent, such as displaying spam ads, performing click fraud, or stealing other users’ passwords," Google said. "Such sites usually don’t attempt to exploit vulnerabilities on the user’s computer system. Instead, they use social engineering to entice users to download and run the malicious content.
"Today we’re pleased to announce a new feature that aims to protect users against these kinds of downloads, starting with malicious Windows executables. The new feature will be integrated with Google Chrome and will display a warning if a user attempts to download a suspected malicious executable file."
Google says the warning will be displayed for any download URL that matches the latest list of malicious websites published by the Safe Browsing API. That means it's a definitions-based warning and not one that relies on heuristic scanning, so don't go ditching your antivirus or Internet security suite.
For those concerned about privacy, Google pinkie promises that this new features follows the same privacy policy already in use by the Safe Browsing feature and does not enable Google to determine the URLs you are visiting.
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