Microsoft Edge just got a secret weapon against scareware

Microsoft announced its new scareware blocker at the 2024 Ignite conference a few months ago and now it’s ready for users to try out. This preview is open to everyone who uses Edge; you just need to make sure you have previews enabled and that your browser is up to date.

Everyone knows about malware nowadays, which means people can get anxious very quickly if they have reason to think their PC has been infected. Scareware scams take advantage of this, using underhanded tactics to make users feel like they’re not in control of their PCs and need to call the “tech support” number provided onscreen. The scammer then gains access to the computer by guiding the user over the phone.

Edge already uses Microsoft Defender SmartScreen to block known examples of these scams, but this new scareware blocker uses a machine learning model to detect new and unknown scams that get past SmartScreen.

This works pretty much how you’d expect — the tool uses computer vision to view the webpage and compare it to the many examples of scareware screens it has in its dataset. One of scareware’s most popular tactics is to use fullscreen mode to make users feel like they’re no longer in control of their computers.

While you can always press ESC to exit fullscreen mode, some people might not know this trick or forget it in the moment. To help out, the scareware blocker will automatically back out of fullscreen mode and warn you about the webpage. Some scareware scams will even try to hijack your keyboard and prevent you from pressing ESC, so the blocker will be particularly useful in these situations. The warning will include a screenshot of the website so you can see whether it really was a scareware scam or not.

If the blocker got it right, you can click to close the page and choose to report the malicious site which will add it to the list of known scams that SmartScreen can deal with. If it got it wrong, you can continue to the page and choose to report it as a false alarm to help train the model and improve its accuracy.

The more people use it, the better the results will get. You don’t have to be a part of the Insiders program to access this preview, so you can turn it on for yourself and your family members right away — I know I will be.