The basics of safe browsing
- Hi, everyone. Sal Khan here from Khan Academy, and I'm excited to talk a little bit about safe browsing. Our guest today is Kelly Hope Harrington, who's a Senior Staff Software Engineer at Google.
Kelly, welcome.
Thank you. Happy to be here.
So safe browsing, my sense of browser, we, you go to some websites, it sends up some webpages. What's the worst that can happen?
Oh, well there, there's all sorts of bad things that can happen on the internet, and I think some of the ones that come to mind first are things like phishing or social engineering. So, someone is trying to trick you into thinking they're someone you trust. So, you share either your personal information like your password or your credit card information, or maybe you do something that you wouldn't otherwise do because you trust them. And that could be something like downloading, installing malware. So, malware is something that will take over your computer. The attacker is trying to do something to get value out of you. So, maybe they want to take some of your personal data and sell it on the dark web. Maybe they want to do ransomware, where they lock down your computer and won't let you use it until you pay them money. Or maybe they wanna do something sneakier and do crypto mining in the background so your computer gets hot and slow while that's happening. We also see unwanted software. So, unwanted software might have something that you do value, but also does something else.
Yeah, so I just wanna make sure I understand this 'cause we talk in other videos about phishing where someone pretends to send you an emergency letter from a bank or whatever, and many of those phishing attacks usually try to get you to some type of a website. And this is where, once again, you're browsing now. You need to make sure that that's actually the website that you think it is.
Yeah, yeah. You know, I think that the attackers know you're looking for stuff, so they're trying to take advantage of you're already naturally trying to go and download something, and that is their opportunity to try and trick you, and try and get you to do something that you weren't otherwise gonna do.
Super helpful.