How it works
How Haven pauses unwanted downloads
Haven stops the download before it reaches your computer and shows a short prompt naming the file and the site it came from. Answer once and the file either downloads or disappears.
Pauses, never blocks
You decide, not Haven. Choose Download anyway and the file arrives normally. Choose Don't download and nothing reaches your downloads folder.
Verified sites pass through
Downloads from verified banking and financial sites are never interrupted, including files served from their separate download domains.
Answer once, not every time
Say yes once and Haven stays quiet on that site for a couple of minutes. Switch the feature off entirely in settings whenever you like.
Why it matters
Drive-by downloads start without a click
A convincing page can start a download with no download button in sight. A fake update notice, a second window, a search result that was not what it claimed. Once the file is in your downloads folder it looks like every file you meant to save.
The most common version is a fake browser update. In Red Canary's 2026 Threat Detection Report, SocGholish, a campaign that shows visitors of hacked websites a fake update prompt, ranked as the 8th most common threat of 2025, affecting 2.3% of Red Canary's customers. Its files often use lookalike letters, so a name like Сhrome.Updаte.zip can hide Cyrillic characters.
Download Guard moves the decision earlier. One tap on sites Haven has not verified, and nothing at all on the sites you use every day.
Worth saying plainly
Haven does not scan files for malware
Haven does not open your downloads, check them against a malware database, or judge whether a file is dangerous. It cannot know that, and saying otherwise would be worse than saying nothing.
What Haven knows is where a file came from. Most download trouble is not exotic malware. It is a file that started on its own, from a page you did not mean to open.
A pause catches that. A scanner usually does not.