This week, Microsoft began rolling out a new malware blocker in its Edge browser. The artificial intelligence-based feature works on Windows computers and can detect and block existing malware, as well as detect new and emerging malware through a local machine learning model.
“Scareware blocker adds a new, first line of defense to help protect users who encounter a new scam if they try to open a full-screen page. The malware blocker uses a machine learning model that runs on the local computer,” the Microsoft Edge development team explains in a blog post. “The model uses computer vision to compare full-screen pages to thousands of scam samples shared with us by the anti-fraud community. The model runs locally, without storing or sending images to the cloud.”
Once a scam is detected, Microsoft Edge will automatically exit the full-screen mode that malicious sites try to impose, stop audio playback, and then alert you with a thumbnail of the page you were viewing. You can report the site to have it added to Microsoft Defender SmartScreen, which automatically blocks Edge users from visiting known fraudulent sites.
The malware blocker in Microsoft Edge, first announced at the Ignite conference in November, is now available in preview in the latest stable release of the browser. To access the preview feature, you need to manually enable it in Edge’s privacy settings and then restart the browser.
