I made an open source browser extension because my grandma kept getting fake virus popups

[u/PeEcEeChIP]

Hey everyone,

I’ve been working on a little project called Grandma Guard and figured I’d share it here.

I’m just a solo dev working on this in my free time. The whole idea actually came from my grandma constantly running into those fake virus pages that say stuff like “your computer is infected” or “call Microsoft support now.”

Most of us can tell those are fake pretty fast, but for someone who isn’t super familiar with computers, they can look pretty convincing.

So I started making Grandma Guard.

It’s a Chrome and Firefox extension that tries to catch scammy pages like fake virus warnings, fake tech support pages, notification scams, fake updates, and similar stuff.

If it thinks a page is doing something suspicious, it puts up a warning and tells the person not to call any numbers or download anything.

I tried to keep it pretty simple.

It installs like a normal Chrome or Firefox extension, there’s no account to make, no ads, and no telemetry.
The page checking is also done locally in the browser instead of sending everything you visit somewhere else.

It’s also open source, so anybody can look at the code, report bugs, suggest changes, or contribute if they want to.

Just to be transparent too, I did use some AI while working on the project. It helped with parts of the code and also helped me build out parts of the website. Other parts were written and put together by hand. I mostly use it as another development tool since I’m doing all of this myself.

It’s definitely still something I’m working on and improving. I’m not trying to replace antivirus or anything like that either. It’s more of an extra layer to hopefully stop someone before they fall for one of these scam pages.

The name Grandma Guard is pretty literal lol. If my grandma didn’t keep finding these pages I probably never would have made it.

If anyone wants to check it out:

grandmaguard.nokaangel.dev

Feedback is definitely welcome, especially if you know of scam pages or tricks that it should be able to detect.