Google strengthens its Advanced Protection Program for those at risk of hacker attack
Google is introducing a new feature in its Chrome browser: antivirus scanning of individual suspicious files. But it won’t be new for everyone, on the contrary: it’s only available to members of the Advanced Protection Program, a sort of club of people who, due to their work or personal reasons, have special online security needs.
Already since August 2019, Chrome has been warning Advanced Protection Program users if a file they’re about to download might contain malware, by quickly scanning the file’s metadata and comparing it to an archive of dangerous files, before starting the download. Now it does even more by offering to send the individual file for antivirus analysis. La scansione avviene nei server cloud di Google, in tempo reale, e al termine dell’analisi il file viene eliminato. Google, quindi, non mantiene una copia dei file inviati. Tutto questo è già disponibile, a partire dal 16 settembre 2020.
Che cosa è l’Advanced Protection Program
La scansione antivirus è riservata agli iscritti all’Advanced Protection Program, un programma riservato ai soggetti “maggiormente a rischio di attacchi mirati online“, come giornalisti, organizzazioni politiche, attivisti, dirigenti aziendali e team di campagne elettorali. To join the program you have to purchase two physical tokens that will be used as an authentication factor.
It’s no coincidence, and Google makes it clear, that file scanning was introduced right around the time of the U.S. presidential election in November: according to Google, political staff members are particularly at risk of attack at this time.
How Chrome’s virus scanning works
With the new feature, subscribers to the Advanced Protection Program continue to receive a warning when they’re about to download a suspicious file. Now, however, the warning also contains a button to send the file to Google for full analysis.
This all works when a file is downloaded from a site, with email attachments, and any time the user is about to download a file within Chrome.