Microsoft SmartScreen Now Protects From Drive-By Attacks

Microsoft announced on Tuesday that with the latest Windows 10 updates, it has extended SmartScreen to include protection from drive-by attacks in Microsoft Edge and Internet Explorer 11.

“Drive-by attacks are malicious web attacks that tend to start on trusted websites, targeting security vulnerabilities in commonly used software. What’s more, they often don’t require any user interaction – so there’s nothing to click, nothing to download – and infection is usually invisible”, Microsoft explained.

The company has developed a broad set of data from sources like Microsoft Edge, Internet Explorer, Bing, Defender and the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit (EMET) to be able to identify these attacks as they emerge, and to turn this information into the intelligence that powers SmartScreen drive-by protection in the browser.

SmartScreen uses a small cache file created by the SmartScreen service, which is periodically updated by the browser to help keep a user protected and to ensure that calls to the SmartScreen service are only made if there’s a high probability of malicious content on a page.

If SmartScreen determines that a website is potentially malicious, users will see a red warning and the content won’t be available in either Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10.

SmartScreen also has the ability to warn users about potentially malicious frames, such as unsafe ads. It can display warnings for only the frames that are found to be malicious, letting users continue to interact with the rest of the page.

Users can expand the More Information link on the SmartScreen warning page to report a site as safe to Microsoft or to bypass the warning. Moreover, if users find a site that they believe is unsafe, they can report it to Microsoft using Microsoft Edge or Internet Explorer 11 on Windows 10.