Opera GX adds the powerful clipboard protection tool first introduced in Opera

Last month, Opera introduced a new security feature designed to protect users from malicious commands pasted to their clipboard. Now it’s bringing it to Opera GX too, offering the gaming-focused browser a much-needed defense against a rising class of social-engineering attacks.

If you often find yourself downloading files, videos, or following links on foreign websites, you have likely come across webpages falsely claiming that something is wrong with your browser. For example, you might see a video that is not playing, and a page tells you to run a command, that your browser needs repairing, or that your system requires a diagnostic.

Clicking through these prompts is one thing, but following instructions to copy and then paste a command into your computer’s terminal is where things can quickly go south.

Opera’s new Paste Protect feature is meant to protect against malicious content being placed on a user’s clipboard and subsequently run by them.

With the update installed, the feature runs in the background automatically, so you don’t have to fiddle with any settings.

Paste Protect scans any content that’s copied to the clipboard locally, then cross-references it against potentially harmful commands being pasted to the clipboard by a website. Opera GX can block the command from being copied or prompt the user to leave the page if it deems it malicious.

This is particularly useful in the face of ClickFix attacks, which are essentially social-engineering scams that lure users into copying and then running harmful commands that appear benign. These attacks don’t rely on traditional malware or exploit code, making them much harder to detect by conventional means.

The manual step required in the middle of these attacks is also what makes them particularly challenging from a security perspective. A user is being misled into doing something dangerous, but there’s nothing inherently wrong with the command itself until it’s too late.

Opera Head of Security Pawel Kurzelewski reasoned that the clipboard is essentially the final frontier before malicious code gets run.

As far as Opera GX goes, the feature is a welcome addition as the browser is more closely associated with its customization and gaming features. While those elements are undeniably important, security features at the system level arguably have a much stronger impact on the average user.

Clipboard attacks aren’t the only recent security threat to afflict browsers though, with malicious or compromised extensions also being used to infiltrate the clipboard with potentially harmful content. This makes browsers a much bigger security risk than ever before, and Opera GX’s new protections are a good step forward in countering those threats.

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