Last year, during Google's Cloud Next 2021 (kind of like I/O, but only for cloud stuff), the company announced it would be taking steps to protect users against malicious content and files. Keeping yourself safe on the Internet today is more critical than ever, and Google Drive in particular harbors a surprisingly high amount of shady content and malware. To help you figure out precisely what kind of files you're dealing with, Google has launched a new feature that will warn you of suspicious files.

When opening a file in Google Drive, whether it's a picture, a document, or basically any kind of file, the service will take a look and let you know if something smells wrong with it. If it's a suspicious file, it'll throw a yellow warning at the top telling you so. It's a minor change, but one that could prove very helpful.

These types of warnings were already present on services like Google Docs, but it's cool to see them in Drive. After all, its use as a file hosting and sharing service has increased, and as we said before, malware and ransomware are frequently hosted on Drive as they are on other hosting services like Dropbox or MEGA. This likely won't solve that situation, and probably nothing really will, to be honest — malware is always going to be a thing as long as we're still using computers. But hey, if it works well, you'll at least be warned against downloading something dodgy.

The feature is now rolling out, but it might be some time before it shows up for everyone, as it's a gradual rollout that will take place over the next 15 days.