Google Online Security Blog
Follow
Using AI to stop tech support scams in Chrome
Tech support scams are a growing form of cybercrime where scammers trick users into believing their computer has a serious problem and then extort money or gain unauthorized access. These scams often use alarming pop-up warnings, full-screen takeovers, and disable keyboard and mouse input to create a sense of crisis. Chrome has always worked with Google Safe Browsing, and now with Chrome 137, it will offer an additional protection using the Gemini Nano large language model (LLM) to detect potentially dangerous sites. The LLM will generate signals that will be used by Safe Browsing to deliver higher confidence verdicts about scams. The on-device approach allows Chrome to detect and block attacks that haven't been crawled before and see threats the way users see them. When a user navigates to a potentially dangerous page, Chrome will evaluate the page using the LLM and send the information to Safe Browsing for a final verdict. If the page is likely to be a scam, it will show a warning interstitial. This feature preserves performance and privacy, and Chrome plans to use it to detect other scam types and roll it out to Chrome on Android later this year.