Microsoft SmartScreen

SmartScreen (officially called Windows SmartScreen, Windows Defender SmartScreen and SmartScreen Filter in different places) is a cloud-based anti-phishing and anti-malware component included in several Microsoft products, including Windows 8 and later, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge and Outlook.com. It is designed to help protect users against attacks that utilize social engineering and drive-by downloads to infect a system by scanning URLs accessed by a user against a blacklist of websites containing known threats. With the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft placed the SmartScreen settings into the Windows Defender Security Center. SmartScreen (officially called Windows SmartScreen, Windows Defender SmartScreen and SmartScreen Filter in different places) is a cloud-based anti-phishing and anti-malware component included in several Microsoft products, including Windows 8 and later, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge and Outlook.com. It is designed to help protect users against attacks that utilize social engineering and drive-by downloads to infect a system by scanning URLs accessed by a user against a blacklist of websites containing known threats. With the Windows 10 Creators Update, Microsoft placed the SmartScreen settings into the Windows Defender Security Center. SmartScreen was first introduced in Internet Explorer 7 then known as the Phishing Filter. Phishing Filter does not check every website visited by the user, only those that are known to be suspicious. With the release of Internet Explorer 8, the Phishing Filter was renamed to SmartScreen and extended to include protection from socially engineered malware. Every website and download is checked against a local list of popular legitimate websites; if the site is not listed, the entire address is sent to Microsoft for further checks. If it has been labeled as an impostor or harmful, Internet Explorer 8 will show a screen prompting that the site is reported harmful and shouldn't be visited. From there the user can either visit their homepage, visit the previous site, or continue to the unsafe page. If a user attempts to download a file from a location reported harmful, then the download is cancelled. The effectiveness of SmartScreen filtering has been reported to be superior to socially engineered malware protection in other browsers. According to Microsoft, the SmartScreen technology used by Internet Explorer 8 was successful against phishing or other malicious sites and in blocking of socially engineered malware. Beginning with Internet Explorer 8, SmartScreen can be enforced using Group Policy. Building on top of the SmartScreen Filter introduced in Internet Explorer 8, Internet Explorer 9's protection against malware downloads is extended with SmartScreen Application Reputation that detects untrustworthy executables. This warns a person if they are downloading an executable program without a safe reputation, from a site that does not have a safe reputation. Internet Explorer Mobile 10 was the first release of Internet Explorer Mobile to support the SmartScreen Filter. SmartScreen filtering at the desktop level, performing reputation checks by default on any file or application downloaded from the Internet, was introduced in Windows 8. Similar to the way SmartScreen works in Internet Explorer 9, if the program does not have an established good reputation, the user is alerted that running the program may harm their computer. When SmartScreen is left at its default settings, the administrator needs to launch and run the program.