The Government wishes to put in place new mechanisms to secure the online activities of citizens. After the cyberscore, we can thus use an anti-scam filter supposed to avoid malicious links.
“We are all concerned and affected: the cyber threat has even gone from being an exception to a daily phenomenon.” It is with these words that Jean-Noël Barrot, the Minister Delegate in charge of the Digital Transition and Telecommunications, recalled the urgency of tackling online scams, Thursday October 27, 2022, during a trip to the new cyber campus at La Défense. To do this, two devices will be implemented: the cyberscore – a code inspired by the nutriscore indicating the level of security of the data hosted by a website or an Internet service (see our article) and an anti-scam filter. This last measure was part of candidate Emmanuel Macron’s program during the last presidential campaign. A first version will be tested during the summer of 2023. The executive intends to generalize the measure by the summer of 2024.
Anti-scam filter: an optional extension against dangerous links
Concretely, the anti-scam filter will take the form of an extension for Web browsers – Chrome, Edge, Safari, Firefox… It will therefore be an add-on that everyone can decide to install or not, based on the voluntary, without any obligatory character. Its role will be to filter websites, according to the potential dangerousness. But we don’t yet know exactly how it will work. It could, for example, warn the user if a site is malicious, or even block the loading of a page. The Minister Delegate in charge of the Digital Transition and Telecommunications thus indicated that the filter “will warn Internet users in real time about threats”.
In addition, a “task force” – a working and action group, in French… – has been charged by the Government with working on the technical side of the creation of the anti-scam filter. Jérôme Notin, director of Cyber-Maliciousnessthe public organization for assistance and prevention in digital security, clarified that this filter is not intended to stop spam and malicious emails, but to warn Internet users when they click on dangerous links. by blocking them or highlighting their harmfulness with a notification: “It will not block the phishing, but the consequence of the phishing”, he thus confided to La Tribune. The working group must submit a report after testing the beta version, during the summer of 2023. Case to follow therefore.