There are no malicious attacks. After all, the very essence of this term presupposes the commission of some kind of active action to undermine the digital security of the victim by the attacker. And when homebrew hackers simply post viral applications on the Web in the hope that negligent users will download them, not caring too much about their origin, this is no longer an attack, but a real one: if it works, it’s good, it’s okay. Another thing is that there are much more of those who indiscriminately download everything from the Internet than those who somehow check the sources and care about their safety.
Google Chrome will receive protection from unsafe files
To save Chrome users, Google developers decided to tighten the rules for downloading data from the Internet. Despite the fact that the browser has long had protective tools that warn about the danger of certain files, now these are absolutely optional instructions that can be ignored. If the user is not too concerned about his own safety or he is sure of the source from which he is downloading a particular file, he can ignore the warning and confirm the download. However, things will change in the foreseeable future.
Why is it dangerous to download files from the Internet
This is how the warning about the insecurity of the downloaded file will look like
'We are here to announce that in the near future Chrome will be able to guarantee the safety of files that are downloaded from resources protected by the HTTPS protocol. Unprotected files pose a serious risk to the well-being and privacy of users. For example, programs downloaded from unprotected sources may contain malicious components that monitor and collect all kinds of information about the user, such as bank statements, etc., 'said Joe DeBlasio, a member of the Google Chrome development team.
Google will gradually tighten the rules for downloading files from the Internet, planning to start introducing new rules in April, when Google Chrome 82 is released.From that moment, a special mechanism will appear in the browser that will directly indicate the insecurity of a file downloaded from a website without HTTPS protection, but only if it has the extension .exe, .apk or the like. Unlike the notifications that are coming now, the new ones will be more defiantly designed to convince the user to refuse to download. The potential danger of the downloaded data will be indicated by a corresponding note and a danger icon – an exclamation mark in a red triangle.
Blocking downloads in Chrome
Then, with the release of Chrome 83, Google plans to start completely blocking executable files and warn about the dangers of archives like .zip or .iso – and so on until the download of all files downloaded from unprotected sites is blocked, up to images and musical compositions. Indeed, as practice shows, you can add a malicious component to almost any file, be it a picture or a video, as happened with the founder Amazon Jeff Bezos. True, he did not download the malicious video himself, but received it via WhatsApp, which, however, did not change anything, and more than 4 GB of data was extracted from iPhone of the entrepreneur.
But be that as it may, Google's initiative could be the main depressing factor in the spread of malware and files. After all, if users simply cannot download this or that data package, which hypothetically may pose a danger to them, this will significantly reduce the growth in the number of infections and leaks of confidential information. Of course, it will not be possible to completely eradicate this practice, but the fact that Google is making its own efforts to do this is already evidence of a lot. After all, as Lao Tzu said, the road of a thousand li begins with the first step.