5 ms·

To be fair, every platform which allows user-generated HTML pages suffers massively from phishing and most of them don't deal with it very well: Google, Microso

by heipei 6y ago

To be fair, every platform which allows user-generated HTML pages suffers massively from phishing and most of them don't deal with it very well: Google, Microsoft, smaller players like Codebox and countless others. Then there's phishing on Dropbox, phishing on Google Forms, OneDrive, etc. Then you have phishing at all the various hosters like DigitalOcean, CloudFlare, etc. Even there you'll sometimes have IPs which have hosting phishing pages for various brands for a long time. It's not an isolated problem. Some deal with it more aggressively, true, but the pace and ease with which phishing can be stood up and modified makes it a whac-a-mole. Plus, the expectation is that most phishing pages will only be active for a few hours before being taken down and/or detected, so phishers pump out new ones on a constant basis. I run the service at https://urlscan.io https://urlscan.io which tracks phishing and frequently run into these cases which render any kind of black/whitelisting impossible. Imagine Microsoft phishing hosted on Microsoft domains and infrastructure. Here's a fun search which will return lots of phishing on windows[.]net and googleapis[.]com: https://urlscan.io/search/#page.domain%3A(googleapis.com%20OR%20windows.net)%20AND%20filename%3A%2F(jpg%7Cpng%7Cgif%7Csvg)%2F https://urlscan.io/search/#page.domain%3A(googleapis.com%20O...

Animats 6y ago
Google tends to be at the top of that list, though. It wasn't always. When I first started doing that, MSN was on top, usually followed by Yahoo. For a while, Google Sheets were being used for phishing. You can put HTML in a spreadsheet cell, apparently. I used to contact nonprofits and small businesses which showed up on that list. Inevitably,they'd had a break-in. With some nagging, I could cut the size of the list in half.
jamieweb 6y ago
I love your service, I use it every day. :) I find that a lot of phishing sites these days are hosted on legitimate sites that have been backdoored, but are continuing to operate as normal. The phishing page is hidden away in the /.well-known/ directory or another similar one, so the website owner is non-the-wiser.
bigiain 6y ago
> To be fair, every platform which allows user-generated HTML pages suffers massively from phishing The big difference here is that all the other platforms struggling (and failing too often) to prevent themselves being used as phishing hosting - aren't then turning around and hypocritically taking other platform's entire internet presence offline for doing so. Google here are acting in the roles of judge and executioner, while being the biggest offender of the same crime.

by heipei 6y ago

Animats 6y ago

Google tends to be at the top of that list, though. It wasn't always. When I first started doing that, MSN was on top, usually followed by Yahoo. For a while, Google Sheets were being used for phishing. You can put HTML in a spreadsheet cell, apparently. I used to contact nonprofits and small businesses which showed up on that list. Inevitably,they'd had a break-in. With some nagging, I could cut the size of the list in half.

jamieweb 6y ago

I love your service, I use it every day. :) I find that a lot of phishing sites these days are hosted on legitimate sites that have been backdoored, but are continuing to operate as normal. The phishing page is hidden away in the /.well-known/ directory or another similar one, so the website owner is non-the-wiser.

bigiain 6y ago

> To be fair, every platform which allows user-generated HTML pages suffers massively from phishing The big difference here is that all the other platforms struggling (and failing too often) to prevent themselves being used as phishing hosting - aren't then turning around and hypocritically taking other platform's entire internet presence offline for doing so. Google here are acting in the roles of judge and executioner, while being the biggest offender of the same crime.