How Google's Safe Browsing Helped Build a More Secure Web

In the beginning there was phone phreaking and worms. So in 2005, a small team within Google started a project aimed at flagging possible social engineering attacks—warning users when a webpage might be trying to trick them into doing something detrimental. And Safe Browsing has always grappled with a core security challenge—how to flag and block bad things without mislabeling legitimate activity or letting anything malicious slip through. In the words of nine Google engineers who have worked on Safe Browsing, from original team members to recent additions, here’s the story of how the product was built, and how it became such a ubiquitous protective force online. Niels Provos, a distinguished engineer at Google and one of the founding members of Safe Browsing: I first started working on denial of service defense for Google in 2003, and then late in 2005 there was this other engineer at Google called Fritz Schneider who was actually one of the very first people on the security team.