Google account hacks: How to protect yourself against shady websites, online scams, more

Google offers an Enhanced Protection Mode to all users that protects them from fraudulent websites and phishing attacks. Here's how to enable it.

Published: Mar 15, 2024, 08:30 PM IST

Image: Pixabay

Story Highlights

Google rolled out new security features to Chrome today.
Google offers Enhanced Protection mode for added security.
This opt-in feature is available to all Chrome and Gmail users.

Google rolled a major update to Chrome today. This update improves the protection offered by the company as a part of its Standard Protection Mode — something that is enabled by default. To give you a quick glimpse, Chrome’s upgraded Standard Protection Mode will now check the website that a user is accessing against a real-time list maintained by Google without sharing any of the user’s data with Google. Earlier, the company used to check the website against a list that was stored on the user’s device and was update every 60 minutes — slower than the rate at which malicious actors removed a fraudulent website. What this will do is that it will provide greater protection to users without necessarily putting additional load on their device. But this is not the only protection that Google offers against the threats on the internet.

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Google offers an Enhanced Protection mode to Google Account users via Chrome, Google Search, Gmail, Drive, etc that not only protects against fradulent websites but also against downloads containing malicious files, and other threats that users may detect on the internet.

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“Enhanced Safe Browsing for your account can help provide more protection against phishing and malware across Google Chrome and Gmail,” Google says in the support page for this feature.

How Google’s Enhanced Protection Mode work?

As Google explains it, this mode works automatically in the background to provide faster, proactive protection against dangerous websites, downloads, and extensions. It checks URLs, downloads, browser extensions, system information and
small sample of pages to protect users.