14 DAY TRIAL // Opera keeps working on improving its browser, and the most recent developer update available for testing provides us with an early look at a new security feature.
It’s called Paste protection, and its purpose is pretty self-explanatory. While the parent company hasn’t provided too many details on this feature, Paste protection monitors the content you copied and is therefore in your clipboard to make sure no other application modifies it.
For example, some malicious apps out there could monitor your clipboard and change information like bank accounts or crypto wallets in an attempt to trick you into transferring the funds into a different account.
So what Opera does is to monitor the sensitive data that is copied to your clipboards, including bank account information, and then display a warning when other apps attempt to read it.
Feature is currently available for testing
“This festive update brings a new feature that makes browsing safer. One potential risk while browsing is the hijacking of your clipboard. By doing this, someone can replace a bank account number or crypto wallet identifier with a different one,” Opera explained in the release notes of the latest dev build.
“Opera has come up with a secure way to protect you from this. When you copy sensitive data in Opera, the data is monitored for changes for some time or until you paste the data. If the data is changed by an external application, a warning is displayed.”
At this point, there’s no ETA as to when the new feature could go live in the stable builds of the browser, but obviously, it will take a while until this happens given it just made its debut in the dev version. Needless to say, the Paste protection will be available in all supported versions of Opera regardless of the operating system you’re running.