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by John W. Simek, Vice President of Sensei Enterprises, Inc.

Chrome to Block Drive-By Downloads from Ad Frames

March 12, 2019

A drive-by download is where malware gets installed on your computer by just visiting a website. No user interaction is required. Bleeping Computer reported that Google is planning to add automated prevention of all downloads initiated from within ad frames for its Chrome browser. As stated in the report, “Ad frames are iframes "marked as ads by the Chromium ad detection infrastructure AdTagging," Google's ad detection infrastructure which matches "resource requests against a filter list" and tags the frames that get a match as ads.” The automatic blocking with be available on all six Blink platforms (i.e., Windows, Mac, Linux, Chrome OS, Android, and Android WebView), but will not be available on iOS since it uses a different engine.

This is a good move by Google and I would expect to see a similar direction for the other browsers.

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