Microsoft hasbegun rolling out a new featurein its Edge browserthis week designedto protect users fromscams—anAI-powered scareware blocker.This tool, which runs locally on Windows PCs, uses machine learning to detect and block both existing and new scams by analyzing full-screen pages.
The technology works by comparing pagesto thousands of known scam samplesshared by the security community, and it doesn’t upload or store images in the cloud. When a scam is identified, Edge will automatically exitfull-screen mode,stop anyaudio playback, andalert the userwith athumbnail of the suspicious page.Users canthenreport the site toadd itto Microsoft's Defender SmartScreen service,which helps prevent other users from encountering the same scam.
First introduced at Ignite in November, the scareware blocker is now available in preview in the latest stable version of Edge. To activate this feature, users need to enable it manually in their privacy settings and restart the browser.
