While most websites are safe, some sites have been designed to steal personal information or gain access to your system’s resources. Thieves by nature don’t care about rules, and will use any means to take advantage of victims, most often using trickery or hacking:

Trickery. Means using things like “phishing” attacks to convince a person to enter a banking password into a website that looks like the bank, but isn’t.

Hacking. Means attacking a system through malformed content that exploits subtle flaws in a browser, or in various browser extensions, such as video decoders. This exploit lets an attacker run code on a device, taking over first a browsing session, and perhaps ultimately the entire device.

While trickery and hacking are threats faced by every browser, it’s important that we explore how Microsoft Edge addresses these threats and is helping make the web a safer experience.

Help against trickery

Web browsers can help defend your employees against trickery by identifying and blocking known tricks, and by using strong security protocols to ensure that they’re talking to the web site they think they’re talking to.

Windows Hello

Phishing scams get people to enter passwords into a fake version of a trusted website, such as a bank. Attempts to identify legitimate websites through the HTTPS lock symbol and the EV Cert green bar have met with only limited success, since attackers are too good at faking legitimate experiences for many people to notice the difference.

To really address this problem, we need to stop people from entering plain-text passwords into websites. So in Windows 10, we gave you Windows Hello technology with asymmetric cryptography that authenticates both the person and the website.

Microsoft Edge is the first browser to natively support Windows Hello as a more personal, seamless, and secure way to authenticate on the web, powered by an early implementation of the Web Authentication (formerly FIDO 2.0 Web API) specification.

Microsoft SmartScreen

Microsoft SmartScreen, used in Windows 10 and both Internet Explorer 11 and Microsoft Edge, helps to defend against phishing by performing reputation checks on visited sites and blocking any sites that are thought to be phishing sites. SmartScreen also helps to defend people against being tricked into installing malicious [socially-engineered software downloads](http://operationstech.about.com/od/glossary/g/Socially-Engineered-Malware.htm and against drive-by attacks. Drive-by attacks are malicious web-based attacks that compromise your system by targeting security vulnerabilities in commonly used software, and may be hosted on trusted sites.