Google has started rolling out a new anti-phishing feature in Gmail on Android that will warn users when they’ve clicked on a suspicious link in an email.
When you click on a suspicious link in a message, Gmail will show a warning prompt helping you keep your account safe. Here’s what you’ll see:
Google is serious about account security:
The feature comes shortly after an elaborate phishing attack involving an app that posed as Google Docs, and tricked a large number of users into granting the malicious app access to their Google accounts.
Google was quick to respond and quickly disabled the infected accounts and revoked the application. Now the company is taking effective measures to stop such kind of attempts.
While not all affected email will necessarily be dangerous, we encourage you to be extra careful about clicking on links in messages that you’re not sure about. And with this update, you’ll have another tool to make these kinds of decisions.
This new feature uses Google’s Safe Browsing database, which catalogs sites known to host malware or trick users into giving away information. However, if the link to malicious app is hosted on Google’s servers it won’t be able to detect it.
