How malware protection works

Every day, tens of thousands of people fall prey to virus attacks and online fraud.
To protect Adguard users from such threats, we implemented a number of filters that protect you from malicious and phishing sites.

First of all, let’s take a look at the terms we’ll use:

Malicious site — a site that can infect your computer with a virus. At the moment, most viruses are distributed through such malicious websites.

Phishing site — a term with a lot of meanings. Initially, these were sites that stole confidential users’ information: logins, passwords or credit card details. In our opinion, the term also applies to sites with all kinds of fraud – lotteries, selling of non-existing content and so forth.

Unfortunately, the web is full of such sites. An inexperienced user can easily become a victim of online fraud. We hope that the use of our security tools will help you avoid these dangers.

Configuring your protection from malicious sites

You can configure your protection from malicious websites in the Protection – Browsing Security subsection in the extended interface of the program.

Adguard malicious sites filter

The malicious sites filter is generated automatically and is based on information coming from two major sources.

• A special Adguard indexing server that analyzes the elements of web pages and checks them for virus signatures.
• Open lists of malicious sites that are automatically monitored by the program.

Adguard phishing sites filter

The phishing filter is generated in a semi-automatic mode. We use public sources to automatically create a list of sites that are suspected of phishing. A number of filter update strategies are used at the same time.

• Automatic monitoring of several public lists of phishing sites.
• Automatic monitoring of sites using heuristic algorithms.
• Complaints submitted by Adguard users.

A generated list is checked by an analyst and the sites that are classified as phishing sites are saved to our database. The period between a site’s appearance on the list and its manual checking is only a few hours.

Google Safe Browsing filters

Several years ago, Google presented an open API that enabled developers to quickly check the status of sites and pages and make sure that they were not on the black list of phishing sites.

We couldn’t pass up such an opportunity and added the support of Google Safe Browsing filters to Adguard. By the way, these filters contain nearly a million sites.

Unfortunately, despite the great number of sites these filters are aware of, they do not cover phishing and malicious sites of the entire Internet well enough. Therefore, we view them only as a secondary tool, not the primary protection mechanism.