While I admire Google for using AI to try and get their users out of a very sticky situation, how about those of us who don’t use Chrome on a regular basis?
I do use Chrome in certain circumstances, as well as other browsers, depending on what I’m doing.
Its quite true that these days, actors will trap you on the page to get you to call the telephone number associated with what they want to get the person to do, but as Malwarebytes says at the end, not everyone uses Chrome but may use Safari for IOS, Firefox for PC or other operating systems, or even edge.
While Malwarebytes has a great browser guard, if the browser manufacturers can get something in place like this to assist, that would be great.
In this article, it talks about manifest version 3 and blocking seeming to be a bit difficult, but I wonder what the other browsers are using?
Spotting a tech support scam is easy, if you know what to look for, but the way they get the browser to play stupid doesn’t help the average user if they realize their machine was fine before they visited the page.
The LLM could learn three things that are highlighted within the article. They are:
- They make your browser tab full screen
- Display the number they want you to call all over the place
- Show the visitor fake ongoing scans and alerts
If any LLM can learn this and the browser manufacturers implement this, it might just work, but only for these types of sites.
What about the other types of scams out there they use these domains for?
I get emails now a day with the language being spanish, leading to some strange link like 121.secure-server.net with all kinds of characters and things.
On the one I went to, it downloaded a very large zip file which was not flagged by anything on Virus Total.
The latest I got was sent a DMG which is a Mac version or something that was flagged by 5 out of 91 with the same page.
The Emails are coming from some TLD called SBS which makes it quite interesting.
If I were to click on the link, should the browser wonder why I’m going to some IP address which is redirecting somewhere else and downloading some unknown file? Maybe, maybe not.
The one that I saw pointed to a .com which was also quite strange.
Could LLM’s do something to see that including looking up the domain in real time and realizing how short it is?
This can happen to anyone using any browser. Let’s see how this goes.
Google Chrome will use AI to block tech support scam websites is the article coming from Malwarebytes, feel free to give it a look!
Make it a great day.
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