![]() ![]() ![]() The goal was to crawl the web and protect users of Google’s main product, which was Search, from links that could point them to sites that could harm their computer. 'But we did not really conceive that 10 years later we would be on 3 billion devices. In the words of nine Google engineers who have worked on Safe Browsing, from original team members to recent additions, here’s the story of how the product was built, and how it became such a ubiquitous protective force online. It underlies user security in all of Google’s major platforms-including Chrome, Android, AdSense, and Gmail-and runs on more than 3 billion devices worldwide. While that problem isn’t completely solved, Safe Browsing has become a stalwart of the web. And Safe Browsing has always grappled with a core security challenge-how to flag and block bad things without mislabeling legitimate activity or letting anything malicious slip through. But setting up such a massive vetting system at the scale of the web isn't easy. When you load a page in most popular browsers or choose an app from the Google Play Store, Safe Browsing is working behind the scenes to check for malicious behavior and notify you of anything that might be amiss. You've been protected by Safe Browsing even if you haven't realized it. And what began as a shot in the dark would go on to fundamentally change security on the internet. By 2007, the service had a name: Safe Browsing. Google began incorporating these anti-abuse tools into its own products, but also made them available to outside developers. So in 2005, a small team within Google started a project aimed at flagging possible social engineering attacks-warning users when a webpage might be trying to trick them into doing something detrimental.Ī year later, the group expanded its scope, working to flag links and sites that might be distributing malware. And as its search platform spawned interconnected products like ad distribution and email hosting, the company realized its users and everyone on the web faced an escalation of online scams and abuse. Google, which will turn 20 in September, grew up during this transition. ![]() By the early 2000s, though, those walls started coming down, and digital crime boomed. But in the nascent decades of the internet, digital networks were detached and isolated enough that the average user could mostly avoid the nastiest stuff. In the beginning there was phone phreaking and worms. ![]()
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