That way, calls to the SmartScreen service are only made if IE or Edge believes “there’s a high probability of malicious content on a page.” The result is a red warning and no content being rendered: To avoid browser slowdown, SmartScreen blocks drive-by attacks by using a small cache file that is periodically updated by your browser. That’s not the case for drive-by attacks, adding significant complexity to the problem, especially in terms of performance. The company explained that all the threats SmartScreen has protected against until now can be blocked after web content is parsed and rendered.

You might be wondering why it took Microsoft eight years to add such functionality. Microsoft uses data from Edge, IE, Bing, Windows Defender, and the Enhanced Mitigation Experience Toolkit ( EMET) to spot these attacks “as they emerge.” SmartScreen can thus block drive-by attacks directly in the browser, preventing the device from getting infected, potentially even before a patch is available.

Over the past year, we’ve seen EKs moving faster to target vulnerabilities in apps with available patches, while also exploiting 0-day vulnerabilities more frequently as well. The vulnerabilities can be either newly discovered ones - also known as 0-days - or ones that have already been fixed in popular software. These are tools that first check your PC for software vulnerabilities (tracked publicly as CVEs) and then try to exploit them. You may want to check the configuration of the SmartScreen feature if you keep getting the error on websites that you didn’t have any problems before.Drive-by attacks make use of services known as exploit kits (EKs) to scale effectively. It’s one of the reasons why Windows Defender uses up to 20% of the CPU power on most midrange computers. If that doesn’t work, try connecting to a different Wi-Fi network and see if the error comes up again. If it is, try restarting it by disabling it and enabling it again.ĭo the same if you’re using a Wi-Fi connection. If you’re wired, check the Ethernet connection to see if it is enabled.

If you’re using Explorer or Edge, you could receive this error if you’ve temporarily lost your internet connection.

SmartScreen for Windows Store apps – Warn.

Select SmartScreen Settings (By default, the settings should be as follows).

Edge smartscreen