Microsoft is launching a new instrument nicknamed “Blocker Stareware”, which uses automatic learning and artificial vision to identify a very pervasive type of online scam.
“Scaraware” ruined the web almost from its institution, often in the form of false antivirus software that claims to have detected a non -existent threat on a user’s machine. So they deceive the user in the installation of a harmful program or pays the software they don’t need.
Just last year, two technical support companies were forced to pay $ 26 million as part of an agreement with the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) of the United States, which had accused the companies of misleading marketing practices.
“These companies have used frightening tactics and brat threats to the personal consumers computers for Bilk consumers, in particular the older consumers, on tens of millions of dollars,” said Samuel Levine, director of the Bureau of Consumer Protection of the FTC Tempo .
Microsoft already offers some tools to block the Scamm websites that have been detected and reported elsewhere, but the new feature focuses on the blocking of previously unknown scam tools when they try to open a whole screen page.
Microsoft made fun of the blocker for the first time at his lecture lecture in November, but now he asks users to help test the function through a preview program in his edge browser.
Set up
Scaraware Blocker requires the user to activate the function through the “Privacy, Research and Services” setting.
This adds an additional level of security to what exists within artists of the caliber of Microsoft Defender Smartscreen, who already looks for suspicious activities on the web pages. Blocker Sareraware intervenes specifically if a scam tool tries to open a full screen page, A tactic that can make it more difficult to identify a scam than to delete it, an example, a user may not know to hit the “ESC” key, exit from the whole screen mode.
Microsoft said she used thousands of sampling scams in the real world to train the automatic learning model that is the basis of the Scaraware blocker. Then use computers to compare these samples with new scams it encounters in real time.
If the instrument suspects the Spavera potential, it will come out of the whole screen mode, it will stop any audio playback (for example an alarm or a voice) that could accompany the scam and give the user the opportunity to continue the page or close it completely.
Privacy
The fact that Microsoft is using Computer Vision to analyze user screens could raise concerns. There are some parallels with the controversial function of recall of the AI of Microsoft, which takes the snapshots of the screens of users to create an searchable chronology of everything they have done on the computer.
However, with Sareraware Blocker, Microsoft claims that the automatic learning model is performed locally on the user’s machine and nothing is saved or sent to the cloud.
To improve the model and the wider Smartscreen Software Defender, Microsoft is also soliciting the first users’ feedback, presenting them an option to share a screenshot of the scam with Microsoft. Users can also report scenarios in which the blocker would be a mistake and block an authentic website.
