Users are seeing alarming pop-ups in Edge and Chrome that look like antivirus warnings. The alerts appear to come from websites that were somehow added to the browser's list of sites allowed to send notifications. This has happened several times recently, and the notifications often try to scare users into clicking links or downloading something. What is the best way to block website notifications outright, preferably through Group Policy or Intune, while allowing exceptions only when there is a legitimate business need?
4 Answers
If the organization uses Intune, you can deploy an Edge policy that blocks notifications for all users. Chrome can be managed similarly with its enterprise policies. Website notifications are rarely essential in most business environments and are commonly used for advertising, scams, or social-media engagement spam.
We disabled browser notifications through Group Policy across the environment. Import the relevant Chrome and Edge ADMX templates, set the default notification setting to block, and deploy the policy. This prevents users from approving notification prompts unless you explicitly add an exception.
For already affected machines, remove the suspicious sites from the browser’s notification permissions and run the normal endpoint security checks. Blocking future notification requests is the more important fix, since legitimate-looking sites can later send misleading ads, gambling promotions, or fake malware warnings.
The site usually gets added because someone clicked Allow on a notification prompt. The safest approach is to disable website notifications by default in both browsers, then create exceptions only for approved sites. Chrome and Edge both support policies for setting the default notification permission to blocked.
That worked well for us. The policy was straightforward to configure and push once the browser policy templates were imported.