There is no denying that the issue with Browser Hijackers is real and that each day thousands of people fall victims to this sort of undesirable and potentially hazardous sort of malware. However, every now and then improvements are being made towards enhancing and improving the online safety of users all over the world and here we will introduce you to one such improvement.
As of recent, the software engineers at google have come up with a new feature for Google Chrome that would allow users to quickly and easily identify potential Browser Hijacker extensions that might have gotten installed onto the browser. Oftentimes, users tend to not notice at first that an unwanted piece of software has been made part of their browsing program which could lead to potential dangers as the longer a Hijacker remains installed, the higher the chances that something more malicious might result from it.
The new feature
In fact, the new trait that Google Chrome will now have is nothing overly complicated yet we believe that it will help many users to early identify and consequently deal with any potential Hijacker hazards. The whole idea behind the new feature is that if an unauthorized extension gets installed onto the browser, the user would be notified about it via a pop-up message that would get displayed in the upper right corner of the browser window. Two different pop-up messages might get displayed to warn the user about potentially hazardous extensions:
- The first possible pop-up would notify the user that there’s an extension in their browser that has taken over the proxy settings of Chrome and that has hijacked the Internet connection of the user. Most of the time this is used to redirect the Internet traffic through the hacker’s servers allowing the online criminals to implement their own illegitimate ads which would get displayed inside the user’s browser.
- The other message that might get displayed would inform the user that a certain extension in their browser has made unauthorized changes to the page that gets displayed when a new tab is opened since a lot of Hijackers are known to do that as well. This notification could also pop-up if a Hijacker tries to cause page redirects or if it changes the default search engine.
To make it easier for the users, the developers at Google have added a button under each of those two pop-up messages that would directly disable the potentially unwanted extension should the user click on them. Of course, there’s the option to simply dismiss the notification without making any changes in case you trust the software that is causing the activities which Chrome has detected as potentially undesirable.
Extension developers and Chrome
Nearing the introduction of this new trait, Google has sent out e-mails to extension developers where they have been told that if they wish to avoid having their browser applications detected by Chrome as undesirable, they would have to only use Settings Overrides API when implementing a feature in their software which might modify the browser. Settings Overrides API is method for different extensions to override certain settings of Google Chrome and is implementation is now required for any developer who wishes to create applications for Chrome that might introduce alterations to the browser without having their extension targeted as a possible threat.
Though a simple improvement, this would hopefully help a lot of users to find out about minor potentially hazardous software on their computers and browsers as well as enable them to quickly get rid of them without the need to go through elaborate methods in order to resolve the problem. How truly effective this is going to be will become clear as the time passes.